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The Role of a Project Visionary

The visionary is an individual who understands the business as well as the technology, and who has the ability to detect trends and to project ahead, to perceive future opportunities based on weak signals.

Easy wins in project management

Amongst all the processes in a business, project management offers the best possible opportunities for easy wins. However, whilst project management is recognised as being vital to innovation and change management, it is often underinvested due to its perceived difficulty.

How to present project management to school students

This is the kind of thing I would prepare if asked to present project management to school students. And I would probably adopt a flipchart style. (This would save having to present a monotonous deck of slides.) I would do something really simple. First the students would want to hear something about the kind of projects that are done and why they are important all over the world. Students like to hear about the exciting real world and there's nothing more 'real' than a good project!

Another look at quality

Quality is usually defined as meeting requirements and satisfying the customer; no more, no less. 

http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=5150

Managing projects upwards

There is one major skill that does not get mentioned enough on projects and that is about the ability to manage upwards.  Managing upwards on projects is not just about the quality of reporting, and it is certainly not a “kiss up, kick-down” mentality, but rather the opposite.  

Critical purpose

Critical Purpose is a new term to define an approach that emphasises the key deliverables.  On every project there are a small number of critical questions that must be answered if success is to be achieved.  The goal is to isolate these critical success factors and to remove the uncertainties as soon as possible by producing some tangible output that can be dependably validated and indisputably verified. 

Improvements and innovation in a world of inter-connectedness

Where do the process improvements come from when you have a mature business, heavy infrastructure, huge capital investments and processes that have been worked upon and ‘optimized’ relentlessly?  

The monkey tree and 'design of experiments'

Imagine a children’s game called the Monkey Tree. Players take monkeys out of the box and hang them on the tree, until the overall weight of the monkeys is too heavy for the tree and then the monkeys start to fall off.  Evidently, with the right company and the right number of monkeys, this can be quite entertaining. 

Never forget the elephant

You can’t eat an elephant all at once.  You will have heard the expression – it means that you have to slice it up and eat it piece by piece.  

Business models

There’s no really good definition of what we mean by “business model”, though it’s certainly a way of organizing inputs to extract value. 

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