project

Top 10 blog posts for 2011, 10 to 6

Closing out 2011 I look back at the year’s most viewed posts as a chance to reflect on differences of what I topics I blog about and what people view most.  Why were some viewed over others:  topic, time-of-year, day-of-week? In descending order: 10. Competing values drives your organization out of business — A 2009 [...]

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Project management is not a process, but a promise

A project introduces something new.  New requires change from what was to a promise of what will.   The project deliverable, or promise, undertaken without process is a leap in the dark.  No sane person will take a leap in the dark without some promise or rational premise of: what will be, what it will cost [...]

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Getting it done versus getting it accomplished

Some people, and some organizations, can confuse very elemental operational concepts.  The confusion is tough to trace to a culture issue or a perception issue between getting it done versus getting it accomplished. Getting it done means you care more about finishing than about quality. Very different terms. Very different concepts. An alternative way to [...]

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Project management is useless without scale

Project management is a profession. Project management is a discipline. Project management is a skill. Project management is a function. Project management is a knowledge Project management is useless without scale and project management helps no one if it is not scaleable. Compare an accounting function of a Fortune 50 company to an accounting function in a 60-person organization.  The [...]

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Business strategy failures are project management failures

The essence of strategic change is not a new direction, but a series of directives on what to start, what to stop, and what to continue. After all, a strategic plan really acts as a roadmap or charter for change.  A plan not carried out is a project failure. The difficulty of strategy implementation is a [...]

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Mergers and acquisitions failures are project management failures

Projects are how organizations realize their strategies.  To remain competitive organizations rely on successful project delivery.  Delivering on budget, on time, and within scope defines project success.  Using a project management hat to review mergers and acquisitions reframes the effort as a project to deliver on budget, within a certain time, and on expected synergies [...]

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Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success; stakeholder analysis template

A stakeholder is anyone [or any group] who can positively or negatively affect the outcome of the project. Risk is anything that can positively or negatively affect the outcome of the project.  So, identifying and managing project stakeholders is an important step to identifying and managing project risk. Each project has a unique set of stakeholders, [...]

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Your star performer creates employee resentment

In school, those model students who shine above others and are always ready to “help” others risk more than a roll of their classmates’ eyes in the working world.  In organizations the model employee willing to help others risks outright employee resentment.  How you identify and manage these star performers may impact more than just [...]

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9 views into your organization with a project management lens

Project management offers a way to breathe new life into your organization’s competitive and operational advantage, but why is project management seemingly stuck in engineering or scientific theory? Project management may look like an engineering, top-down control process, but project management is less process and more a discipline:  like accounting.  Anyone familiar with accounting knows asset [...]

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2 priorities for competitive advantage

In addition to sales and finance, there are 2 complimentary organization priorities that leaders should focus on to achieve and sustain excellence: understand motivation deliver projects in a routine manner Organizations can stake out a competitive advantage by doing things cheaper or doing things better.  Motivation and project management are 2 ways an organization can [...]

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In review: Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect

July 2010 in review. A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect — As a manager, running a team takes more than lining people up and pointing to the finish line.  People are all not only motivated by salary.  A leader or a manager may feel sabotaged when their [...]

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Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect

An intervention. Interventions are principal learning processes in the “action” stage of organization development (OD)*. An intervention is what people outside organization development [the majority of professionals are distinctly NOT part of, or aware of, organization development] might call a project, change, or transformation.   The reason a professional might call for an organization intervention, or project, [...]

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Charley Matera, Principal, HiComm Consulting

“I have worked with Toby over this past year, 2009 – 2010, on a signicant change management project in which we are both stakeholders.  Toby came into this process midstream and immediately provided a fresh perspective on both strategic and operational issues. “His ideas have helped to re-frame the project into a more ambitious and [...]

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4 tips to use Twitter for project management

In my last post I presented a case to manage your projects as a business portfolio. The ability to deliver projects on time, on budget, and within scope directly impacts your organization’s ability to compete and stay alive and project failure is an organization-wide risk. In this post I want to introduce Twitter to manage [...]

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3 reasons for failure: change, participation, and risk

An organization builds a culture of success when it can take a strategy, identify and prioritize the most important projects within the strategy, and consistently deliver projects on time, on budget, and within identified quality standards. Charting success is not easy. 80% of all projects fail for three main reasons. 1. 80% of projects fail [...]

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Change management, project management, and the intervention

Change Management is the Illness Overwhelmingly, organizations rely on process analysis to identify opportunity for savings. Process analysis is most commonly identified as change management. Change Management: Analyze and diagnose business and operations processes with a focus on the greatest areas of improvement in cost, schedule, and quality. Very few enjoy having themselves and their [...]

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