I had an interesting conversation earlier this week where an observation was made that the job market is flooded with very competent doers but what we really need is more thinkers. That got me thinking about what mind-set and behaviours a person needs to bring to the table and, equally as important, how projects and activities should be set up in the first place.

I am constantly hearing stories of situations where project drivers are not clear and where ownership is confused. I have encountered a fair few myself. Commonly, there is an imperative to ‘just get it done’ with only scant attention paid to the measures of success and the level of enablement provided by the operating environment. In situations like these there is often a premature expectation regarding the solution based on recycling some approach that has ‘kinda worked’ before but which might not be applicable this time around. Deprived of any real opportunity to influence the direction, people are put to work executing the mechanics of the game without really having much skin or belief in it. This is clearly not a recipe for success.

Read more…

A project can be anything that requires multiple steps to complete. It’s a managed process that takes you from ‘A’ to ‘B’ and if ‘B’ is a better place than ‘A’ then the project has probably been a success. Sometimes a project can be accomplished with a simple task list and a single person. Sometimes it needs multiple teams in multiple locations collaborating in a variety of ways to realise something quite complex. On other occasions, several projects must to be orchestrated in such a way that they converge to deliver a shared program goal.

The more complicated your situation, the more important it will be to avoid the project killers that I will identify below. Regardless of the context of your particular project(s), these things can almost certainly send it off the rails or, at the very least, make life pretty uncomfortable.

Read more…

Over the past few months I’ve had several conversations around the topic of the Minimum Viable Product [MVP] and prototyping as though they are, in some way, fundamentally different beasts. Personally, I see one as a subset of the other and view them both as part of a necessary continuum that helps maintain alignment and reduce risk during the new product development journey. Initially, you want to be sure that you’re building the right thing. Later, you want to deliver reliable functionality that makes good on the promise. In my mind, an MVP is simply one kind of prototype that happens to be focused on customer-centric issues related to desirability and viability.

Read more…

Have you ever taken a design for a physical product through to production? If you have then you’ll appreciate the need for a solid and useable Bill of Materials. Have you ever tried to develop a maintenance program for a physical product or system? If so, then you’ll know how pivotal the Bill of Materials [BoM] was in helping you define the modularity and level of spares inventory required. I believe there is an underlying assumption made by businesses struggling with the transition of a new product into production and deployment – that the development BoM is automagically transferable without rework and review.

Read more…

A few days ago I enjoyed a high energy weekend mentoring at the Lean Startup Machine workshop in Sydney. Around 65 participants formed 12 teams to explore their startup business ideas and make sure they were properly focused on delivering value. Not surprisingly there were quite a few discoveries and changes of direction. The final outcome was impressive with some well-crafted pitches delivered in style and validated in a variety of ways including that all-important cash commitment. Startups aside, I believe the underlying ideas have an important part to play in any innovative endeavour regardless of scale.

Read more…

I had an interesting discussion last week where a very capable manager was complaining about being stretched and not having sufficient time to capture the process. Critical information was trapped in the heads of key personnel and this made it difficult for new staff to get up to speed without impacting those experts. Also, many process and ownership related problems resurfaced on a regular basis because there was never time to capture the outcome of the previous debates. Focusing solely on business-as-usual [BAU] is a trap. Few companies want to simply maintain existing performance; most want to improve it in significant ways.

Read more…

There’s been quite a lot of debate in recent years related to the need to take risks and have the courage to innovate. There is a concerted push for us to escape entrenched thinking about incremental change and take more plunges into the unknown in order to really differentiate and succeed. Coupled with this view is the idea that we need to embrace failure and, in fact, wear it as some sort of badge of honour. This seems especially popular among the budding entrepreneurial set. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Read More…

In a recent article in Management Today, Lynda Gratton offers three keys to building a sustainable working life – deep mastery, building a posse of associates and being part of the ‘big ideas’ crowd. In principle I have to agree and, in fact, these ideas seem pretty obvious at first glance. It makes perfect sense to keep up to speed with the latest thinking and to position yourself to be part of the conversation. It also makes perfect sense to build and maintain a responsive network of colleagues and advisors – who’s going to argue with that? But it is the idea of ‘deep mastery’ being an essential component for success that made me think twice.

Read more…