Michael Carman Consulting: Change Management, Strategy & Performance Improvement

Three Quick Tips to Improve Your Projects

Here are three quick thoughts to help bolster project success, and the first in a new and punchy series with the self-explanatory title Strategy Snippets.

Project Health Check: Three Quick Tips to Improve Your Projects
The key to wrangling a project, to making it tractable, is to ensure you can get your head around the length and breadth of it. Here are three aids to doing that:

1. Ensure there is a place to park new or unresolved issues – such as a Parking Bay or Issues Log – to ensure these don’t get lost before they find a home. And then make sure you have a mechanism, such as a regular project or working group meeting, to review and allocate them, and track their resolution

2. Ensure there is a specific means of identifying, capturing and managing risks. This should sit across the project plan so that factors which might hinder the accomplishment of project milestones are flagged, with sufficient time for them to be addressed

3. Communicate … even when there is no change. An absence of communication is not the same as a communication of ‘no change’ or ‘no progress’. It’s still important for people to hear ‘Nothing to report’ if that is the accurate project status update. Ensure a constant flow of communication up, down and across all participants and stakeholders … and don’t confuse a message of ‘No change’ … with no message.

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Strategy Snippets: The Three-Dimensional Spider Web
Although tangled and messy, the Redback Spider’s web functions in three dimensions rather than the two dimensions of the typical spider web.

Does your organisation’s or division’s strategy operate in two dimensions, or three? Are there mutually reinforcing facets: think of the way Walt Disney’s TV appearances in the 1950s fed awareness of and interest in the newly built Disneyland, which in turn prolonged and reinforced Disney characters and films. Or do they only operate only on a single plane? Are your operational and risk management systems multi-faceted enough to function three-dimensionally or are they merely ‘flat-file’?

Next time you see a spider web, let it prompt you (as you're reaching for the pest spray) to think about the depth and breadth of your strategy.

Warm regards,

Michael