One of my favourite cartoons is of a leader fighting a war with swords and bows and arrows not having time to meet with a salesman who is selling a machine gun because he’s “too busy fighting a war”.
When you’re finding a task or process difficult and then someone suggests a new dimension that you consider beyond what you’re doing right now, your reaction is often “that’s extra work” or “I haven’t time to focus on that” or “that’s something we’ll get round to when we’ve mastered the current problems” — ie when we’re more competent and capable in our current processes and tasks.
But what if this new dimension helps to eliminate many of the current problems your are dealing with, makes easier the remaining workload and achieves the desired results without being either “extra work” or an option to be adopted later.
As an analogy, take a product repair department. If a repair department is struggling to cope with the equipment repair workload and someone suggests a new dimension, namely, componentization, they’re likely to say, “that’s extra work and we’ve haven’t got time to focus on that” or “that’s something we’ll get around to when we’ve sorted out the existing workload backlog.”
Yet componentization can make repair easier by replacing item repair with component replacement (reducing repair workload) and allowing faulty components to be identified leading to an improvement in the quality of components leading, in turn, to a better quality product and a reduction in the need for repairs. This in turn will also lead to better meeting customer expectations for a good, reliable product with reduced repair needs, costs and time and, potentially, increased sales.
But to move from item repair to componentization requires a different focus, and requires taking action to change how you look at and subsequently construct your products.
This is the same situation with investment value delivery management from projects.
It requires a different focus and requires taking action to change how you look at, approach, construct and manage projects. But it is not “extra” work or something you should “get around to later”, it is a new approach and way of thinking about projects which makes projects easier, improves the quality of the outcomes and reduces the time and costs involved. It delivers the outcomes and benefits projects are set up to deliver to their customers improving customer satisfaction and reducing post-project trauma.
So, when you read about investment value delivery don’t think, “We’re too immature to focus on this,” but instead think, “This will actually solve many of the problems we have at the moment enabling us to deliver more projects and more value in less time and for less cost.”
Take the challenge. What do you have to lose except all of the problems you have today with your projects?
