Managing projects to deliver business value is often seen as ‘extra’ work.
Extra or Alternative?
“We have enough trouble just trying to get the project up, running and delivered without considering benefits” seems to be a common response.
Poor estimating, poor planning, missing business cases, all are cited as evidence that there are “more fundamental issues” to be addressed.
But managing a project for value is not ‘extra’ work but an alternative approach to delivering projects that makes many of the common problems go away. It also directly addresses why we do projects — to realise the business outcomes and associated value.
How many of you have worked on a project that no one can articulate what it is specifically going to do for the organisation?
How many of you have worked on a project where the number of unknowns is unknown?
How many of you have worked on a project where time has run out for adequate change management, so the solution is just rammed in?
And so on.
Totally Optimized Projects is an approach to delivering projects that requires:
- Carefully defined, specific, measurable and widely agreed ‘desired business outcomes’ that make clear the business end states to be achieved, the real definition of success
- Defined scope definitions that are (potentially) different for the problem and solution stages of the project and different for the business and the project teams (the latter being a subset of the former)
- Fully defined process-based business requirements that can, often, eliminate 40+% of the process steps before you seek a solution, reducing time, complexity and costs to implement
- Projects to be managed as ‘change projects’ from day-1 so that delivering change and realising benefits is fundamental to every dimension of the project and is achieved continuously and progressively
- The project’s profit and loss (value and costs) are managed for the long term business impacts, not just the ‘on time/on budget’ project impacts, and so on.
In Conclusion
These are not extra steps but alternative steps to the ‘off and running, technology-driven’ approaches so commonly used. AND, as we have proven again and again, when TOP approaches are used, the projects can be delivered in less time and for less cost and deliver all of the benefits.
So, rather than trying to improve your current approach to project delivery, choose a simpler, faster more effective approach — Totally Optimized Projects.
