risk

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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People, process, and technology … divided by behavior

People, process, and technology. Announce a policy, full adoption. Map a process, cycle time guaranteed. Buy a server, flip the switch. Seems so simple. Interconnections, systems, are never simple. The intent of keeping people, process, and technology in mind is to think through the impact change has on the 3.  Identify that impact and then [...]

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Organization innovation dies when industry myopia prevails

Industry myopia is business risk.   People who grow in one industry or cycle through only one industry may seem safe to hire, because they may slot in quicker or bring competitive advantage, but industry myopia rarely meets innovation’s need to break things to start over or to view things from a new angle.  Innovation depends on [...]

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Social metrics that matter to your boss

A business case usually relies on numbers.  Numbers to justify the investment, numbers to project the return on investment, and numbers to compare against other investment opportunities.  Numbers that matter, matter differently dependent on the view of the person you talk to.  Certainly social media, or social software, numbers rely on us to know our [...]

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The bureaucracy option to manage risk

Does organization culture benefit with bureaucracy?  Bureacracy may, indeed, provide organizations a strong case to manage risk. Policy, procedure, and bureaucracy tend to creep as an organization grows in size:  revenues, market share, employees. While a small organization may have flexibility and ad hoc procedures based on 1-on-1 interactions, as an organization adds people the [...]

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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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Fistful of beans 02/09/2011

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Apple, With or Without Steve Jobs — Bloomberg Businessweek Perhaps there is a coincidence last week’s Fistful of Beans presented an article to divine Google’s possible transformation through their leadership queue, but it looks like Apple is heading into their own multiple-choice risk scenario.  Now [...]

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In review: Motivation management is resource management

January 2011 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Motivation management is resource management — Leaders, managers, and coworkers are all under intense pressure to manage their motivation to, firstly, show up at work and, secondly, deliver to their expectations and, yes, and to their organization’s expectations.  Juggling our own professional motivation [...]

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Technical ability does little to mitigate risk

Organizations don’t simply run from a strategic plan prescription.  Projected cash flows don’t deliver themselves.  Business units don’t run in a vacuum.  All these efforts take the collaborative knowledge, ability, and skills of people and teams. If you recruit people with evaluation efforts that focus on industry experience, work history, and academic education, evidence shows [...]

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Quality communication in social media

As a professional statistician, I help doctoral students design quantitative research studies, and analyze and interpret their data, for their dissertation.  It occurred to me that some aspects of a doctoral dissertation could be applied to social media communications to make information and conversations more rigorous and tractable. If all you have is a hammer, [...]

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

October 2010 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success; stakeholder analysis template — Risk is anything that can positively or negatively effect the outcome of the project.  So, identifying and managing stakeholders is step to identify and manage project risk.  Each project has 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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Mergers and acquisitions systems thinking strategies, part 3

Systems thinking strategies for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) provide better integration valuations and post-merger operations.  Organizations are composed of several components that interact with each other while simultaneously act as part of a whole.  Systems theory helps explain dynamic interrelationship of several parts, beyond information technology or back office functions. No matter the motive for [...]

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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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In review: Mergers and acquisitions systems thinking strategies, part 1

October 2010 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Mergers and acquisitions systems thinking strategies, part 1 — Leadership, management, and talent create and sustain organization success.  The total environment of an organization is a major determinant of corporate choice and corporate success. A key to change is circular reasoning — Supporting the [...]

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The key to change is circular reasoning

Innovation is based on circular reasoning and the key to innovation is change, but change relies on community, but what does community rely on?  Let’s try to break into this circle [stay with me, further down the list reveals why I started on 2.]: 2. Can’t have community without transparency 3. Can’t have transparency without [...]

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In review: Golden parachutes reward risk or moral hazard?

September 2010 in review. A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Golden parachutes reward risk or moral hazard? — No matter the solutions recently suggested, like England’s Cadbury and Hampel codes for public companies, America’s recent financial-reform act, or clawback clauses, there remains one conflict:  business ethics will never win over moral hazard. The bureaucrat and bureaucracy revisited [...]

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When a small business should fear growth

A small company is a dynamic, creative place where it is necessary for people to take risks to build a new organization.  Leaders of small companies are visionaries and there are strong demands for innovation to do more with less and to bite off grand goals.  The people that work in small companies work around an assumed [...]

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Golden parachutes reward risk or moral hazard?

The July 31st Economist wrote an article called The wages of failure and brought an interesting perspective to those CEOs dismissed because or PR disasters.  Do golden parachutes reward bad leadership or reward risk crucial for a firm to rebuild, re-imagine, and compete within capitalism? The article acknowledges the outrage many have to folks like [...]

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In review: A key to why so many companies blow it in social media?

August 2010 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month: A key to why so many companies blow it in social media? — Do companies blow their social media efforts because they are afraid to fail, preferring to fall back on old marketing rules?  The comments section offers a chance for Jonathan Salem [...]

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Discounted risk is human capital risk

Many firms admit they rely on the quality of entrepreneur to determine their funding decision, but rarely is this “quality” represented in a measurable, comparable assessment, or at least as measurable as weighted average cost of capital, discounted cash flow, capital asset pricing model, risk-adjusted rate of return, and other abstract financial models. Human capital [...]

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Evaluating risk: financial models versus competency models, part 1

We make models to get an idea, on a small-scale, of what might happen on a large-scale.  Models help identify risk and attempt to predict outcomes.  Many use models to then run scenarios or alternatives to identify what could or should be.  Models then become a map for many management discussions as models provide options [...]

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Venture Capital and the descent into irrelevance

The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. Elemental finance: you assume the amount of risk suitable for an expected payoff. You assume bigger risk and its bigger payoff with the full caveat that there is an equally big downside loss that could happen. Invest in a money market and get slow, steady, decimal-point-% returns; [...]

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Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success, part 2

The key for organizations to grow and to thrive relies on how to manage projects.  And how you and your organization manage projects for organization success is an industry competitive advantage.  But why do so many projects fail? Is it lack of preparation? Is it lack of communication? Is it lack of commitment? No, those [...]

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

On my previous post, Scope or:  how to manage projects for organization success that included the eBook Scope – Kills Bad Breath and Kills Projects [link below] I introduced the importance of scope before a project launches.  The numbers on project failure are sobering:  90% of all projects fail and this post follows up both the blog [...]

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Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success, part 1

Organizations rely on projects to remain competitive.  Projects are the way organizations deliver and realize their executive strategies.  The ability to deliver a project is the ability to compete.  Scope kills projects and projects that are not delivered kill organizations.  Scope is one of the most important ways to manage project success.  And when projects [...]

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The Unemployed Will Not Be Considered – 3 Views

This morning I read something that made me hold my, very hot, coffee in my mouth longer than I expected as I processed their information. Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post reports “Disturbing Job Ads:  The Unemployed Will Not Be Considered“. Ms. Bassett comments on a job board search for quality engineer that notes states:  [...]

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Human capital portfolio management and simple math

A venture’s viability really comes down to a bet on a team to deliver.  It is the interpersonal process where venture performance is most impacted. Modern portfolio theory allows investors to maximize return and minimize risk.  The goal is to estimate both the expected risks and returns, as measured statistically, as an accumulation of investments.  Why use [...]

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Risk is an unnecessary (p)art of the deal

To identify where risk is a real part of the investment deal you will commonly hear an equity firm or VC partner claim, we invest in the people.  When it comes to costs, human capital usually represents nearly 70% of all operating costs, but most investment firms focus investment decisions and deal valuation not on [...]

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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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Why your business strategy is a project portfolio

It starts with an executive need: a new market evaluation; improve operating margins; a game-changing technology; your competition is eating your lunch. Whatever the reason, a project is how an organization translates an executive strategy. The ability to scope and deliver a project is a competitive advantage. The best organizations realize project management capability as [...]

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All projects are human capital projects

The valuation of a company usually involves 4 areas: physical capital, financial capital, intellectual capital, and human capital Valuation is a combination of science, art, and straight voodoo (Enron anyone???). Voodoo aside, when I recast these valuations from a new angle, I see each relies, in their entirety, on people: physical capital – people are [...]

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Innovation, the technical risk to IQ

I see and read so much about offers to teach or facilitate innovation, but what is innovation? Innovation is risk Innovation is dialogue Innovation is opportunity (also known as diversity) Are you innovative: Do you ask good questions or do you listen without judgment or without looking to interrupt? Do you allow yourself and people [...]

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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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The VC’s missing formula: human capital discounted cash flow

What valuation models measure human capital ability to meet financial and strategic business goals? What formulas are used to measure human capital contribution to profits? What are the human capital risk factors you justify when you build your financial statements and projections?  Accounting’s assignment of assets and liabilities and financial management’s current or pro forma [...]

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Competing values drive organization resistance

Organizations, like people, develop.  A start-up has different organization qualities than a 25-year-old, Fortune 500 company.  As operations increase in scale and scope a start-up faces new pressures.  Each increase in production, staffing, or market share increases their operating risk.  What worked as a start-up company with a staff of 5 and $500,000 in sales [...]

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Statistically, your strategy will fail

I recently ran across a statistics book and began to think about similarities to strategic planning. Statistics:  a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data.  It also provides tools for prediction and forecasting based on data. Until this week, I had not thought statistics had as much in [...]

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In review: Leaders and fishing

May 2009 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Leaders and fishing — Leaders craft the vision and convey how to embark on a course from what is to what could be.  Leaders must rely on their managers to manage, but leaders need to roll their sleeves up and steward the message [...]

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Culture war

Does your company have a hiring philosophy to find people who fit into the company culture? Do you interview people to fit into the culture of your division? Do you interview people to fit into the culture of your team? Why do we look for people who will fit in when what your business needs [...]

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