An Uphill Battle or Downhill Empowerment

(This article has a happy end)

Improvement strategies often seem to fight uphill battles with the organization. With people falling back all the time, it is almost impossible to win.

This article is about how to empower your organization downhill. A simple project management hack is to eliminate the biggest disablers that hold back your people, teams, and projects. It is now possible with one simple tool.

What everybody is doing today

Normally, for making teams more efficient or improving project performance people must better organize their work, stop multitasking, stop procrastination, better prepare their work, report performance, learn to plan, how to estimate, master planning software, improve communication, learn how to handle scheduling conflicts, mitigate risks, process updates, respond to change, administer risk reserves, motivate people, understand the critical path, report frequently, align dependencies, manage stakeholders, manage expectations, control costs, monitor progress, setup portfolio dashboards, manage resources, level workload, ….

This is stuff you need for managing projects, but if you need to improve productivity or want to make teams more efficient, then that is possible in just a few days or weeks without virtually anybody changing anything.

The biggest disablers that hold people of their work

Everyone in projects has a specific task, but regardless of what they do, they all need to get their work done. And how much they get done, depends on their ability to devote their time and attention to it. That ability is the constraint. Of course, better equipment or training might enable them to do more. But the biggest disabler is they have too many other things to do…. Or when they must wait. Or when they get distracted all the time. Or confusion and chaos.

The biggest disablers that paralyze teams

It is the obligation of their team to prevent these disablers. And to align work. To overcome obstacles and to solve problems. The constraint for teams is their ability to collaborate. Of course, some training might enable better communication, but the biggest disabler is when they don’t have the time for each other when the team is not complete...

This is causing projects to run into problems all the time

It is the obligation of the project to make sure there is enough capacity. The constraint is the ability of project managers to get enough capacity to complete the project successfully. And of course, you can provide better planning software or get them certified, but the biggest disabler is when there are too many other projects.

How project organizations lose control

It's the obligation of organizations to sell and initiate new projects. The constraint of project organizations is their ability to execute projects efficiently. And the idea is that more projects are more efficient.

And of course, you can introduce lean to become more efficient. Or operational excellence. But the biggest disabler is when they are initiating too many projects. And that is what organizations do. They initiate too many projects. Organizations are their own disabler when they grow and become more complex.

Planning software isn't fixing this

The prevailing idea is that organizations need advanced and complex planning and resource management software to control the workload and capacity throughout their organizations. You know how hard that is.

Nobody knows that...

But nobody knows, is that project pipelines are perfect systems according to systems theory. A characteristic of systems is that they can be improved without changing the system, without knowing the details of what is inside, and even ignoring external influences.

Days or weeks instead of weeks or months

The big take away is you can set it up in a few days or weeks, not months or years. This knocks down the one big domino, that knocks down the rest. It takes away the disablers all at once that hold back your organization. This empowers your people, teams, and projects downhill. They don’t need to anything at all, for improving practically everything.

Free mini-course Project Pipelines Decoded

There is a lot of knowledge and literature about managing projects. But how to execute a project portfolio efficiently, is hardly understood. It is one of the project management mysteries that still exist.

But not for long when you watch this free mini-course Project Pipelines Decoded.