The Challenge

Organisations have never faced more challenges, or had more opportunities, than they do today. Emerging technologies, evolving markets, and new ways of doing business are developing every day. How can an organisation thrive in this environment?

Strategy is no longer a differentiator. A great strategy is not enough – it’s simply your ticket to play.  Your competitors also have excellent strategy. Then there are the start-ups entering your space who have iterated on their strategy five times before lunch. Strategy is not enough.

Enterprises have transformed to manage cost, and that’s great. You need transparency of your cost base to survive. But cost management will never drive growth.

The biggest question facing a modern business is: how do we grow? We have excellent strategy and great people, so why is growth not happening?

That question can be transformed into another one, closer to the source of the challenge. To grow, you have to execute. The real question is “Why can’t we execute?”

Why can’t we execute?

I see three common patterns across the organisations I work with:

Pattern 1: Navigating the Grey Space

You have a strategy. You have great people. You have clear goals. Why is nothing getting delivered? You’re struggling to move from ‘This is what we need to deliver’ to ‘We are executing relentlessly, delivering value every day.’

It’s common for organisations to get stuck, wheels spinning, in the ‘grey space’ of ideation, inception, and discovery, unable to move to relentless execution. It’s frustrating and wasteful, and your competitors are getting ahead.

I have seen great teams tear themselves apart over this. They want to deliver value today, but they are spending their days endlessly cycling through nebulous goal definition and scope refinement. It’s dispiriting. “When can we start building something?”

I can work with your executive and delivery teams to navigate through this grey space, and guide you on to relentless delivery. I have developed a simple, transparent, and effective approach that short-circuits the ‘Grey Space’ fast, and repeatably. There are three elements to getting there:

• A proven, highly-evolved, scalable framework of artefacts and documents that capture the critical elements of your project, without drowning you in paperwork. I call this ‘Minimum Viable Bureaucracy.’
• A Way of Working that enables and empowers your people to excel and be their best. It’s based on the principles of Transparency, Trust, and Collaboration. I make sure everyone understands what interactions are needed, and knows how to structure the key conversations to ensure that the project delivers.
• A Culture of Trust. I work with your leaders and their people, coaching them on the beliefs, behaviours, and language that build trust. A high-trust team can achieve amazing things because it has the resilience and adaptability to adapt to change, to identify and eliminate problems, and to learn and improve.

I work with you and your teams to work through the uncertainty to a point of ‘Good Enough’ where we can start executing. Then I guide and coach your teams through the first iterations as they gain confidence, build trust, and start delivering.

My goal is to work with your team until they are under way and iterating on the solution. Then I  transition out, and the teams continue to success.

The analogy is training for a marathon. I’ll act as your trainer and coach. I’ll help you map the course, then coach you to building fitness and endurance. I’ll be there when we fire the starting gun, and I’ll set the pace with you for the first five kilometres. Then I’ll pull off the course, and your teams will take up the running. I’ll be there on the hills to cheer you on, and I’ll be there to celebrate with you at the finish, but my role is to build capability, not to become a permanent fixture.

Pattern 2: Lost Momentum

You have a program. It was going well. Now it seems to have slowed to a halt. You still believe in the outcomes, and you’re still investing, but delivery is disappointing. Team morale is dropping, problems start emerging faster than solutions, and the whole endeavour starts to look non-viable.

The extreme of this mode is a program you know is in ‘zombie mode.’ It’s dead, but no-one has put it out of its misery. This is an unhappy situation for everyone involved.

Every Delivery Leader has been there. You know something’s wrong, but you’re not sure how bad it is, whether it’s fixable, or even what the root cause is.

I’ve been called into a lot of these situations. I’ve seen literally dozens of troubled situations, with miserable teams and disaffected stakeholders.

I can work with your teams to discover the real problems, to perform a root-cause analysis, and to use my experience and expertise to develop a remediation plan.

I will present the plan to you and the teams, showing traceability of remediation to root cause to outcome. If you want, I can be with you while you execute the plan, but it may be enough simply to give you the way ahead. Either way, you will have concrete, executable actions to get your project back on track.

Pattern 3: Portfolio Chaos

You’ve set the program up, and everything is happening at once. One stream seems to be going well, while another is still working out its scope. That one seems to be generating a lot of activity but little progress. Half your day seems to be spent on a this one, even though it’s all noise that the PM should handle. The new contract PM insists on using his personal spreadsheet template to keep track, your internal people are using another tool, a junior who stepped in to help is trying Microsoft Project, and Dave just runs things out of his head.

As an Executive, there’s so much going on that you don’t know where to look. The project teams keep bringing you problems. Reporting is inconsistent or non-existent. You’re spending so much time fire-fighting that you have no time to govern and provide direction. The Executive are losing focus, and you’re at risk of missing something critical amid the noise.

In the chaos, you’re no longer setting policy, driving strategy, or giving direction. You are fire-fighting. This mode can be tremendous fun, or it can be absolute misery. The key point is that you are losing control.

This situation requires discipline, focus and transparency. I can work with all your delivery leaders and executives to find out:

• What should be happening?
• What do we think is happening?
• What is actually happening?

I give your teams simple but powerful tools that capture the complete state of every initiative, and make it visible in a consistent way. The centrepiece of these is the “Portfolio View”. This captures a 12-week forward-looking view of every initiative. It shows outcomes achieved, investment made, and benefits realised. It creates transparency of goals, plans, progress and problems.

Once you have the Portfolio View, some magical conversations become possible:

• Is this all the work?
• Does this ‘keep the lights on?’
• Does this drive our strategic commitments?
• How are we going to do this?

In addition to that, it transforms the way your team react to change and to new requests. Instead of “Yes” or “No” it becomes “What are the consequences of making this commitment, and are all the stakeholders comfortable?”

By elevating the conversation from tactical fire-fighting to  strategic discussion of the portfolio, your teams can get back to delivery, and the executive can get back to policy, strategy, direction, and governance.

Let’s Make This Happen

If this resonates with you, I’d be delighted to discuss how I can help your organisation smash through the roadblocks and deliver amazing value for your customers and stakeholders. My contact details are at the bottom of this page.