6 mistakes lean practitioners make

The most common cause of ineffectiveness in lean projects comes from the inability or unwillingness to learn from past experiments. Zach Nies outlines six common mistakes of lean practitioners and how you can avoid them.

Creating a culture of engagement and accountability

Leaders build a strategic vision, mobilise an organisation to execute that vision, and guide an organisation through and around implementation challenges. Dr Tom Rose explains how engagement and accountability complements a high-performing team.

Creating a Culture of Engagement and Accountability—Tom Rose

Creating a Culture of Engagement and Accountability
Executives and their leadership teams do three big things. They build a strategic vision, they mobilise an organisation to execute that vision, and they guide an organisation through and around implementation challenges that occur in making that vision a reality. In pursuing this threefold agenda, leaders actively cultivate a context that both engages others and promotes their accountability—this includes junior colleagues, peers, and senior colleagues.

To address today’s pressing challenges most leaders and their executive teams have crafted strategic visions for how to win the hearts and minds of customers and secure profitable growth. While many have confidence in the vision, they have much less in its execution. Many executives worry that their organisations will not successfully execute the plans needed to make the strategic vision a reality. They foresee implementation challenges.

People will have to do new things or familiar things differently. They will also need to drive results within tight timelines and budgets while negotiating the challenges of working with global and often remote teams.

Author: Tom Rose
Review status: N/A

Getting to know your project team

How do we form the project team? Who and what competencies do the right group of people need in order to get our projects to successful outcomes? Elissa Farrow looks at the benefits of getting to know your project team before launching a project.

Optimal project portfolio selection

The selection of projects and programs of work is a key function of both public and private sector organisations. Doug Wheeler discusses the lack of consistency in project selection across different organisations, leading to poor decision-making.

How to deal with risk sentinels

One of the key components of risk management and stakeholder management is the routine reassessment of the stakeholder community and the risk climate. Pat Weaver looks at risk sentinels and how they could save your project.

The five functions of governance

A lot of people confuse management with governance so there are many myths about how governance works. Dr Lynda Bourne on the five functions of governance versus management.

Contributing factors in optimal project portfolio selection—Doug Wheeler

Contributing factors in optimal project portfolio selection
The selection of projects and programs of work is a key function of both public and private sector organisations. Ideally, projects and programs that are selected to be undertaken are consistent with strategic objectives for the organisation; will provide value for money and return on investment; will be adequately resourced and prioritised; will not compete with general operations for resources and not restrict the ability of operations to provide income to the organisation; will match the capacity and capability of the organisation to deliver; and will produce outputs that are willingly accepted by end users and customers.

A modified Delphi approach has been applied in this study to investigate best practice and to determine the factors that contribute to optimal selection of projects, and the associated strategic level decision making.

There are various standards and practices that some may recognise as representing best practice in this area. Many of these have similar characteristics and this study has found no single best practice. Each of the participants in the study related to practices that are appropriate to the organisation, the size and nature of the candidate projects, the regulatory environment, its stakeholders, and the experience and capability of its personnel.The study identified the factors that contribute to the optimal selection of projects as: culture, process, knowledge of the business, knowledge of the work, education, experience, governance, risk awareness, selection of players, preconceptions, and time pressures. All these factors were found to be significant; to be appropriate to public sector organisations, private sector organisations and government owned corporations; and to have a strong linkage to research on strategic decision making. These factors can be consolidated into two underlying factors of
organisation culture and leadership.

The significance of the conclusions from this research is that organisations that do not give due consideration to the underlying drivers of organisation culture and leadership, will continue to make sub-optimal decisions on the billions of dollars they invest in projects each year.

Author: Doug Wheeler
Review status: Presented at the AIPM 2014 National Conference