I suggested “3 new Ps” - Productivity, Priority and Purpose.

My thinking was that planning is all very well, but one of the first questions I tend to ask clients when I am starting a project with them, or indeed picking up a struggling project, is “why are you doing this project in the first place?” - the purpose.

No point perfectly planning exactly the wrong thing…

Purpose
This is why purpose is so important. From a pure business point of view, effort expended going down dead ends is pure waste, on the bottom line. An extra £ of cost hurts more than a missing £ of sales after all. What is perhaps worse is the effect that such wasted work can have on morale and motivation, potentially driving a wedge between managers and their teams. If you can’t share a clear sense of purpose for a project, stop it until you (and the others involved) can explain it. Really.

Productivity
So, Productivity. Let’s assume that productivity as our aim or ambition is the first key; since doing more, in less time with fewer resources lets us make money, save money, save time, and as a result generally do the fun and important things in life. The improvements in productivity should support our stated purpose. We should be able to measure or quantify the productivity benefits.

Priority
Priority is the other difficult thing to get right; usually because priority is a fluid, living thing compared to written plans. If it was easy, we’d never struggle to set priorities, share them, and all work in concert. I’ve heard that this is actually not always the case…

Quite often, with both successful and failed projects, we work with clients to do post mortems - root cause analyses of why good and bad results happened. More often than not, the difference between the two types boil down to two things; communication, and priority.

I could then argue that priority is just a form of communication; so, there you go, everything in life boils down to communication - including planning, prioritisation, productivity and clarity of purpose.

So, for your current or next project, how clear are:

• Purpose
• Priorities
• Productivity goals?

And how do you know that other people genuinely share your understanding?

Are they written down, have you asked people?

Worth a check.

Risk Management is a huge area with lots of specialist people, companies, books, qualifications and so on. So should we even go there if we’re not black belts…? And what’s this about elephants?

My own opinion is that even for us “non-experts”, giving risks just a bit more priority in planning, projects and management has a big positive impact on delivering results.

One thing that we tend to do at CAL for the majority of our projects is maintain a risks and issues log. This was born of our PRINCE2 experience (and the need for something lighter than full PRINCE for the majority of our projects).

At its simplest, a risk log is just a list of the things that could go or have gone wrong, which you review regularly (the last bit being the important thing!).

Anything you add to the list is really just helping you rank or prioritise risks, quantify them, or plan to mitigate (avoid) or manage (contain) them.

An honest discussion with key people at the start of a project, large or small, will usually turn up some concerns that people have - things that could stop success from being achieved.

So, You Mentioned An Elephant…?

In these meetings and discussions, it is not uncommon for “the elephant in the room” to make itself known too, and perhaps this is why people don’t like doing even basic formal risk management. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to be worrying about all the things that could go wrong when really, it’s the time to get everyone fired up. Especially the elephants - the big things that we all know are potential problems, but no-one likes to admit or bring up in meetings…

However, done correctly, I think risk logs are very positive - they give the team a sense that “we have a plan for anything we might face”. They identify early on the things we need to watch out for, and if we can mitigate or avoid a risk, we even save ourselves the pain and effort of having to manage the fallout. That’s why I use mitigate and manage as two separate terms by the way - almost “before and after”, or the difference between “risk” (hey, it might happen) and “issue” (oops, it has happened).

The last point was succinctly put to me by a client - “if you can smell it, it’s a risk; if you’re standing in it, it’s an issue…” Erm, back to elephants perhaps…

The last thing I usually put in a risk/issue log is a list of the assumptions we make to keep a project moving along. My view here is that an assumption is a risk until it is a fact or not - maybe “latent risk” is a descriptive way of putting it.

A Risk Log Is A Form Of Communication

As I wrote at the start, the best risk log in the world is pointless if it is not regularly reviewed and communicated appropriately across the team. I see the risk log as being as important as the project plan or weekly/monthly report. It is how we share with our team what we are concerned about, and what we are doing to avoid and contain risks.

It does take discipline to make all of this happen, but stick with it, it’s surprising how quickly you feel uneasy if you don’t have a basic, up to date view of the risks you are working with.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how risk management has helped you, or how an Elephant trashed your project!

I often end up in situations where I am helping businesses make tricky decisions, some of which may have been put off for some time. They usually involve big, important things that affect people, profit, livelihoods, even lives.

You know the scenario - it’s an important decision, but practical concerns are also weighing on your mind and your time. You know that the “correct right answer” is to get everyone involved, explore every possible permutation, input and outcome, test and measure, review then finally deploy. You also know that your “gut feel right answer” is just to make a decision and get on with it, trusting your experience.

Which route do you take? On the one hand, you could avoid making a spectacular wrong decision. On the other, you can avoid the sort of delay and debate that makes businesses grind to a halt on things that should be being blitzed and improved.

This is where I tell people about “The Headline Test”.

Take a few minutes out to imagine how your decision process and conclusion would be reported in the papers or on TV, if things went really wrong, or if it was spectacularly successful.

What would the journalists home in on? Inspired guesses, missed factors, assumptions you made? Things you did investigate? Things you didn’t? People you did or didn’t speak to.

What would the BBC say? The Times? The News of The World? The Daily Mail? Trade press? How would a reasonable person react? How would you react if someone was recounting the story to you?

I often find this to be a thought-provoking question, that frequently initiates debate and focuses minds on the external view of what we are discussing.

Of course, this is just one vantage point from which to view the options you may face, but as I write, with both the Iraq War inquiry and the trial of both companies and individuals (right down to a maintenance engineer) for the Concorde crash under way, we never quite know what decisions of ours may come under scrutiny in future.

What would the papers say? It makes me think, what about you…?

See the official case study on the EACS website (opens in new window).

Critical Action acted as partner to award-winning IT services provider EACS to augment their technical and consulting knowledge with our project planning, management and risk management skills.

The project was a major infrastructure upgrade, carried out within tight budgetary and time constraints.

The award of this accreditation is part of a project we have to develop a new product for our SME customers, aimed at streamlining the management of lots of the basic, fundamental information that our businesses rely upon.

The new product is an online “pay as you go” service which gives you and your business a suite of straight-forward tools to manage your staff time, expenses, and so on, without having to pay for big systems and servers up-front.

Whilst we develop the product, if you are interested in knowing more about how Critical Action can help you get the most from your technology, to help people do things better, please contact us.

Just look back 5, 10 or 20 years to see how far we’ve come. Who hasn’t said to themselves “if you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be [insert amazing thing we take for granted now], I’d have laughed at you!”

Often, it’s the simple conceptual ideas that seemed a bit too out of reach, or outside of the existing ways of thinking, which have had the most unbelievable impacts.

The idea of lots of pages of information that you can link up in whatever way you fancy and then follow them through. Who’d be interested in that?

Teeny-wee device that you flip open to talk to someone on the other side of the planet. Nah, fine for Star Trek but how could that apply to me?

Thinking like this prompted us to run strategy workshops by “jumping forward and looking back”. This is what we mean by “future history” - writing history that hasn’t happened yet.

Pick your crazy idea, and work out the steps that it took for that idea to become accepted. Just like the internet/world wide web. Just like the mobile phone.

It’s normally pretty difficult to get the average business exec gathering to think this way from cold, so what we do to prepare is look back in time the same distance - of 2, 5, 10, 20 or however many years. We write it up, and look at what basic stuff we did and used then, but laugh at now. We get people to shout out their own memories of the time, and the economic and social factors that were at play at the time. Building a picture.

Get people to recognise how far we’ve come, and they will will be more willing to think of how far we can go.

Then, let the brainstorming begin!

The ice-breaker, by the way, is usually to highlight what was at number one in the music charts way back then, or the year’s big blockbuster film.

This is a great, fun approach to strategy, that often brings out “the big, hairy, audacious ideas” that challenge your thinking and make you look at what you could, and should achieve with your business or organisation.

Business Value Planning Services engagements are 3, 5, 10 or 15 day projects which are focused on reviewing processes, and planning for improvements using Microsoft’s Information Worker technologies. Best of all, for customers with sufficient Software Assurance benefits, this service is free, thanks to us working with Microsoft.

Business Focused

In line with Microsoft’s continuing focus on delivering business benefits, the BVPS projects are as much focused on reducing costs and risks, and improving value and profitability as they are on the technical solutions. This is a great fit with Critical Action’s “On a Mission” campaign to simplify consulting - be critical (analyse and understand) and then take action (do things differently) - so we invested in this accreditation.

Make The Most of Products You Probably Already Have

By making the most of products like Office, SharePoint, InfoPath, and so on (which many companies are licensed for but under-use), businesses can save time, reduce duplication, automate processes, and spend more time adding value and making money.

Working Directly or With Microsoft Partners

Critical Action can work directly with customers to identify potential process improvements, and alongside Microsoft Partners to let them add another valuable offering to customers.

Please contact Critical Action to learn more about Business Value Planning Services.

Allow Us To Introduce…

The new intro "in action"

We have recently created a “quick intro” to Critical Action Limited, as a PDF for you and your clients to download.

It explains a bit about what we stand for, and introduces our new campaign message - “On a mission to simplify consulting“.

If you print it out and fold in three, it has our popular guide to workshops and projects inside, to help work out what type of engagement best meets your or your customer’s needs.

On A Mission

Our new campaign is focused on spreading the message that working with consultants on process improvements can bring quick results and insight as well as making the big strategic changes happen.

It boils down to doing two things:

Be Critical - Analyse and understand, then…

Take Action - Do things differently, and better.

(And yes, that is how the company name came about!)

Everything around these two basic principles is simply adding detail or understanding in the ways most appropriate for your situation, reducing unknowns or increasing confidence.

“Think and Do”, “Brain and Hands”, and so on are common phrases for a reason. Bringing it back to this sort of level helps to stop things getting over-complicated when all you want to do is cut out waste and do more with the people, processes and systems that you already have.

Download the introduction now (opens in a new window), and let us know what you think about the new introduction - and about us being “on a mission”!

Click here to see them (in a new window). Some are quite thought provoking, which is, I suppose, the intention.

These were quite timely for me, as I am preparing a “future workshop” for a client. The board of the organisation wants to get their senior management together, so that we can discuss, debate and define elements of where they should be in 5-10 years. They want to cover service offerings, processes and elements of what technology should be enabling them to do.

I normally start by giving a “potted history” of where things were 5-10 years ago, to make people think about how far (or otherwise!) things have come in the same timeframe that we are going to look forward over. I might just use some of these videos after that to get the debate going!

By the way; around this time, 10 years ago, Lawrence Dallaglio resigned as England rugby captain after a drugs scandal, NATO called off the air war in Kosovo, and two students went on the rampage at Columbine High School killing dozens of students.

That was the news, what were you doing, how did you do it, and what tools were you using?

How much have things moved on for you?

We’ve just had a period of sunshine and rain that has been great for the grass in our horses’ field, but it has also caused the ragwort to sprout. Ragwort is poisonous to horses and needs to be thoroughly eradicated from fields (I think it may even be an offence to knowingly let it grow).

This means going out with a special fork to remove the plants including the deep roots. My wife asked me to concentrate first on the plants that had grown enough in the week to flower, to prevent them going to seed and exacerbating the problem.

Being my usual self, I set out with the wheelbarrow and fork, determined to clear every last vestige of ragwort from a 3 acre field.

After an hour, maybe a bit more, and getting less than half-way, I was struck with a thought.

This was a great analogy for the need to balance quality/perfectionism against getting stuff done/priority.

Even though I am a perfectionist, I found myself asking if perfectionism is the enemy of priority?

Does unthinking perfectionism create its own problems?

I wanted to compeltely clear the field (perfectionism/high quality). However I know that as ragwort seeds can survive for many, many years there will pretty much always be more growing. So, I’ll have to keep going back with my barrow and fork. Extra effort would perhaps not appear to be wasted in the short term, but within days, the situation would return. My extra time could be better spent elsewhere (priorty/getting things done).

I realised I would be as well following my wife’s advice, and just taking out the larger plants.

As my natural bent is to be a perfectionist, this thought made me come back home, look at my diary for the next week, and for the goals I’ve set for the next month, quarter and year, and have a conversation with myself about what really did need to be perfect, and what could be done to 80% - and why.

Yes, 80/20 works, but sometimes you need to take the right thing to 100%.

The challenge, I think is to work out which 100% tasks are ”pulling ragwort” and could simply use up all your time to stay still, and which are going to make a step-change difference when you do them.

Maybe, selective perfectionism is the answer.

Planning brings together perfectionism and priority. Not rocket science, but that’s a different way of relating and thinking of things…