Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Life and Business, Organizational Transformation, Project Management, Strategy
I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.
In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project.
Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:
- The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.
- Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.
- Tools are misapplied.
- The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.
- Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings.
- Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.
- Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned
- A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.
- The Voice of the Customer is never heard.
And so on…
Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success. I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.
Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:
- Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.
- Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.
- Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.
- Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.
- Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.
- On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.
- Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.
- Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.
The Bottom-line for Now
The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs.
While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives. Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders.
Sustaining Performance Excellence in Business and in Life
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation
It genuinely bothers me when organizations spend years and untold dollars reinventing themselves and succeeding with a quality framework (i.e. Baldrige or Six Sigma) only to show up in the business press as an organization fighting for survival.
It’s like the obese person with one foot in the grave suddenly committing to health on America’s Biggest Loser and at the end of the program, successfully completing a marathon. For a moment, life is good and our belief in our capacity to do anything that we set our mind to, restored. Certainly the experience and lessons-learned during the successful journey to improve have changed this individual’s life for the better. And then, we glance at the tabloid cover in the grocery store checkout line to see a picture of this fat then fit and now fat again individual working out with a box of Krispy Kremes.
I wrote a related post a few days ago with the harsh title of Change or Die, and upon second thought, the title should have been: Change & Sustain or Die. Organizations and people are fairly adept at changing for a moment at the end of a gun barrel, but they are not so good at sustaining the change when the barrel is no longer pointing their way.
- There’s the former Baldrige winner that lost their CEO in an untimely passing. The new leader took a cost cutting mentality and ended up cutting out programs and people critical to the organization’s focus on performance excellence. The ensuing performance included a stint in bankruptcy. That’s a bad case of the Baldrige Blues.
- Motorola is given large credit for helping create the Six Sigma Quality framework. Their focus on process improvement and their Baldrige award are legendary and define the culture. The company is fighting for survival, mired down in completely forgetting the Voice of the Customer in pursuit of endless elegant iterations of cell phones that no one wants. Their imbalanced scorecard had them losing $12 for every device they sold last quarter and burning through billions with a “b” in cash over the last year.
- Ford. Enough said.
- GM, don’t get me started.
It’s not like Toyota withheld key information about the legendary Toyota Production System and the many other business practices that they learned by applying Deming’s principles, studying the writings of Henry Ford and the unique innovations in the operations of early supermarkets in the U.S.
- Circuit City. See ya. (OK, this one is unfair…they never achieved any form of recognizable Performance Excellence.)
The Bottom-Line For Now on Sustaining Performance Excellence
Leadership is always an issue when it comes to performance, and in my opinion, it is THE issue when it comes to sustaining excellence. The various Quality frameworks offer essential directions for the never-ending journey in pursuit of creating value and continuously improving, but the secrete is that there is no final destination.
Achieving milestones and winning awards helps reinforce the progress on the journey, but leaders at all levels have to foster a culture that is perpetually dissatisfied. The fact is that the market never sleeps, customer issues/needs change constantly and there are always competitors interested in taking your share of the customer’s budget.
An MBA student reminded me the other night of Andy Grove’s (Intel) classic book and philosophy: Only the Paranoid Survive. Perhaps we should work on a Balanced Scorecard measure for Paranoia. Actually, that raises an interesting question. What do your metrics and measures and scorecards truly tell you about whether you are continuing the upward climb or falling backwards, potentially into oblivion?
Hey leaders, wake up. Someone’s going to have you for lunch while you are busy basking in the glow of your latest quality award. And speaking of lunch, do you know how long it will take you to work off that piece of carrot cake? Just say no to the dessert and get to the gym tonight. You’re looking a little pudgy.
Another related post: Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measures Include a Warning Light?
Managing Resistance to Change
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change
At the risk of showing my inner-nerd, one of the more memorable sayings from the Star Trek series of shows (post Kirk & Crew) is: “Resistance is Futile.” This of course was the mantra of the Borg, a race of part-human, part machines that sought to assimilate all life-forms into their collective. Of course, their fatal weakness was that they were only able to operate as a collective…and lacked the many characteristics that ultimately serve as advantages and that make us distinct as humans. (OK, I suspect that I’ve gone beyond showing my true nature and nerdiness.)
Resistance to Change in corporate life is a very real force, and of course, the bane of existence of the many advocates of change challenging you to put aside your fears and embrace the new way of doing things.
H. James Harrington, writing in Quality Digest in an article entitled: Managing Resistance to Change—How to handle the inevitable, offers some insights and perspectives on dealing with this very powerful and limiting force in pursuit of a shift away from an organization’s status quo. He writes:
“Sponsors who drive change tend to think of resistance as an inexplicable but avoidable force that affects people. When resistance occurs, they believe it’s actually a result of somebody’s failure. Typical responses are, “What’s wrong with that person? What’s wrong with that group? Why won’t they support our change effort? There must be something wrong with those people.” In fact, such a perspective is a major barrier to successful change.”
Most so-called change agents when faced with resistance will adopt the universal tool for breaking through…the organizational sledgehammer. Instead of finesse and psychology, resistance is often met with arguing, imploring, and something a bit more insidious…political approaches to gain compliance or eliminate the roadblocks. Alternatively, Harrington offers: “Expect resistance and manage it, either through a preventive or healing approach.”
His fine and short article reflects a “seek first to understand and then be understood” philosophy to dealing with this inevitable characteristic of organizational life. Check out the rest of the article for his prescriptive guidance on dealing with resistance.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Resistance to your agenda for change might seem futile to you. After all, who can argue with the expected benefits that you’ve so eloquently and logically outlined. As Harrington indicates, you are going to pay for resistance up-front by dealing with it, or your going to pay during the life of the initiative. Some resistance can be overcome through training and education and the rest will only be solved with accountability measures. Proper investment up-front will hopefully minimize the cost and pain as the initiative unfolds.
In Search of the High Performance Team
A special note: today is Veterans Day
While we may struggle in business to consistently produce high-performance teams, our soldiers in service of our country live this on a regular basis. Thanks to those who have served, those who are serving and to all who have sacrificed. Our gratitude has no end.
In Search of the High Performance Team
I regularly poll my seminar participants and MBA students on their team-focused experiences in the workplace and I am consistently surprised when very few report ever being part of something that they would classify as a “high performance” team.
The results of my unscientific polling are all the more surprising given that we live during a time when involvement in short-term projects with individuals across functions is a part of the regular work experience of most professionals.
The business literature is filled with articles and interviews from leaders and pundits on topics tied to innovation, business execution and team heroics. Of course, the same companies tend to be the focal point of these articles. It seems like we cannot get enough of the stories of heroics pulled off in companies like Apple, Ideo Google and the few others that seem to make the short-list for the popular business press. It’s curious that those companies got the memo on creating high-performance teams and the rest of us are relegated to reading about their successes.
When I ask about involvement on high-performance teams, there is invariably someone in the audience sharp enough to ask me what I mean. Admittedly, my definition is one of those kind of squishy, you’ll know it when you experience it answers. It’s also a multi-part answer that goes something like this:
- A high-performance team is a group of people that have figured out how to work together to knock down and succeed in pursuit of audacious goals. They’ve learned to leverage their respective strengths, compensate for weaknesses and tap into the power that a group of people uniquely focused on a goal are able to generate.
- High-performance teams thrive on challenges, revel only momentarily in successes and mostly seek the next big challenge. They tend to be paranoid about becoming overconfident and in general, they don’t seek significant public recognition.
- The working environment on this team is comfortable for collaboration, encouraging of disparate opinions and singularly focused on turning ideas into actions. High-performance teams are
self-policing. Values and accountabilities are clear and there is an explicit expectation that membership requires honoring the values. Membership on this team is a true privilege.
- The leader on a high-performance team recognizes that his or her role is teach, to knock down obstacles and to constantly focus on creating the environment that allows others to succeed at high-levels. This leader may be tough, but this leader tends to be quiet, letting actions talk. You generally won’t find this leader to be loud and boisterous, although they may be a great cheerleader as well as a stern disciplinarian behind team walls.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leadership is a pre-requisite for the creation of a high-performance team. Perhaps if more leaders focused on their responsibility to empower others, I would see some more hands raised when I ask about whether your employees have been part of a high-performance team. It’s not too late to start working on this.
Change or Die
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change
Perhaps it is human nature, but we tend to eschew change either in our personal habits or in business settings until we are faced with mortality.
In organizations, most significant change occurs during times of crisis when the threat of extinction sufficiently motivates individuals and groups to consider changing long-standing ways of doing things. The crisis brings into stark focus the fact that it is easier and less costly to accept or embrace change than it is to suddenly become extinct. Unfortunately, by the time this clarity is achieved at the top leadership levels, it is often too late.
As difficult as it is to follow the news everyday, we are living and working through a period of time when the extinction of firms and industries is taking place in front of us, like some business simulation game gone horribly wrong. The game unfolds like this: focus only on short-term results, add in a measure of personal greed, consistently make the wrong decisions and act shocked as the results spiral out of control to the final act….a low probability of success, last ditch effort gambit (or bailout).
For some, the distance from the top of the Mount Olympus to the graveyards and swamps below is fast and furious. The suddenness and rapidity of the fall is shocking, but perhaps easier to digest than those firms that have systematically planned their own demise step-by-step as they move from Masters of the Universe to what will soon be footnotes in our history books and business texts.
As in life, there are no guarantees of survival…there is no prescriptive formula that says “if you do X then you survive and prosper,” but there are methods to improve your odds.
How to Improve Your Odds of Survival
- Senior leaders must embrace the fact that survival and prosperity occur only at the pleasure of customers. Instead of giving lip service to the importance of customers, you need to develop systems to constantly seek out, understand and translate into actions the Voice of the Customer. This is remarkably difficult to do in practice and requires for many an impossible shift in culture and values. Nonetheless, you must change or die.
- Senior leaders must embrace the fact that without motivated, dedicated employees they have nothing. There can be no doubt that satisfied, engaged, respected, informed employees are essential for survival and success. Why then are our systems and our managers and leaders so often at odds with what it takes to create an environment where employees will gladly give their best. The poor leadership habits that are vestiges of another era must change or you will die.
- Call it total quality, performance excellence or whatever you want, but you must embed the notion of high performance and all that it takes to achieve it into the DNA of your organization’s culture. Success can breed success or it can give birth to complacency. An unyielding focus from the firm’s leaders on creating a high performance culture is required. This means that the fire-fighting mentality must stop, clear performance/quality priorities established and the systems developed to allow these to succeed and for people to learn in the process. You must change to create a learning organization or you will die.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Change or die. It’s that simple.
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