My post on the PMO relieving pain prompted a response by ActiveEngine about pain being crucial to gain people’s attention. Pain and uncovering it can be a multi-layered process seemingly without end- i.e., dealing with one problem inevitably leads to having to deal with others which can get discouraging. This is probably because the “swamp is being drained”. Read my response below:
Pain is an interesting phenomenon. One of the analogies used for improvement is “draining the swamp”. When you drain the swamp you start seeing a bunch of ugly rocks. In project management this means getting rid of the projects …read more

Following up on Margaret Rouse’s post on my Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series, today we deal with the mythical queue:
Margaret: You really got me thinking. I think what REALLY blew me away was when you said that 74% of all projects fail — and that the number could be even higher for IT projects. I’m interested in any concrete strategies you can offer for avoiding getting small projects lost in what we used to call the mythical queue.
Bob: The PMO or, for smaller firms, some type of project control function, succeeds with excellent business processes for project visibility, strategy …read more

Margaret Rouse blogs at IT Knowledge Exchange on an amazing variety of topics. Read it and be informed! I find some of the most interesting blog commentors are IT people who engage with me about innovative project management processes- clearly they are making an effort to bring IT and the user together. Her post about my Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series led to a very nice conversation, edited for brevity, and repeated here today and tomorrow:
Margaret: The line that stuck in my head from [your] post was: Usually something painful drives the creation, or reevaluation, of a Project Management …read more

A great article in Strategy+Business, “A Blueprint for Strategic Leadership”, concentrates on how to lead innovation. In it the authors emphasize that the best leaders pay a great deal of attention to the design of the elements around them. Seemingly basic, but powerful, things to do are:
1. Articulate purpose,
2. Create effective teams,
3. Prioritize and sequence initiatives, and
4. Redesign the organization to make execution easier.
Apart from revealing the importance of doing the right projects, the article is full of fascinating examples of the deployment of these principles by the best executives; two from the experiences of A.G. Lafley, chief executive of …read more

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey and report in Strategy+Business (register for free) found NO correlation existed between R&D spend and innovation. It turns out that higher innovation performers spent less but made sure that innovation projects aligned with corporate strategy and paid careful attention to customers. This idea that a company can spend less and innovate more makes sense. Throwing money at innovation processes that are not well organized and/or measured and not serving the customer doesn’t work.
Black and Decker revealed the two key factors related to their innovation success:
1. Strategy alignment- align innovation strategies to corporate strategy.
2. Customer focus- …read more

Sometimes you get unexpected insights. My post “What’s Harder? Project Management or Management” elicited a wonderfully simple “boxes” analogy from Ren Garcia at Accounting Solver. In it he said:
“In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become rigid over time and the boxes neglect to communicate with each other (The managers or heads of boxes are supposed to be doing this, but often neglect).
Consequently, integration of all the functions / tasks / responsibilities within the corporation becomes a difficult process. The entire …read more

 
Fascinating conversation with an executive of an agile software development firm about transformation projects as they compare to lean manufacturing initiatives. Lean transformations have settled into starting with training heavily laced with practical activities. The reason that this is so important is that the approach is NOT intuitive.
Lean requires a person to experience how the concepts can change and increase the value of a process, whether it be software development or manufacturing products. One of the most valuable exercises is the traditional lean manufacturing simulation consisting of 4-5 iterations of improvement to clearly reveal how each lean concept influences results. Many times …read more

A recent September 2007 Gartner study titled “Building Agile Manufacturing That Enables Transformation” made several great points:
1. Changing forces in market, customer expectations and technology demand more agility and quickness in business processes.
2.  Using a ”myths” leading to “misses” discussion they challenge people to look outside their environment for innovations saying that people and companies tend to “lock in” to solutions because of tradition and inability to search outside their four walls.
3. ”Chaos-tolerant” business processes are what is needed in the future. Using a technique called capable-to-promise as an example of chaos-tolerant business processes, they say that future technology will enable them.
Capable-to-promise is basically the ability to quickly …read more

 
Excellent “Strategy+Business” article (free registration required) on “See For Yourself” advice for executives wanting to short circuit innovation cycles; it is a great history on lean/”go and see” origins of Toyota, Wal-Mart and others who have adopted these techniques. The idea of short-circuiting the cycles created by the barriers of multi-level organizations, approval and budgeting processes exists in agile software development and any kind of project environment.
Most projects surface innovations as they drive to satisfy their original intent. Many of these innovations are simply canned because they don’t fit with the original specification. Key projects require an executive level approval to stray …read more

Rueben Slone, Executive VP of Supply Chain for Office Max looks outside his company for innovations. His quote in APICS magazine’s article (sorry, membership required), “Career Essentials: Adept Supply Chain Professionals Help Companies Thrive” caught my attention:
“The difference between a groove and a grave is only the depth.”
He’s speaking about comfort levels and the ability to see beyond the walls of your groove. If you become comfortable in what you are doing to the point of NOT considering new ways of doing it you can lose – your job, your company, and your career. The idea of looking outside your …read more