Blueprint for Success

A team at Warwick Business School has surveyed 500 above average trading performance businesses employing between 20 and 250 staff.

These business had these approaches in common:

1. Striving for growth – seeking to increase sales
2. Managing flexibly
3. People planning – skill needs and focus on staff development
4. Marketing – reach new customers with broadcast
5. Research and development – technology, new ways of doing business
6. Process changes – reducing costs, improving service quality

How does this apply to programme management, change management or project management?   We can use these to consider things we might need to plan to under pin the success of our projects.

Growth in business is measured in sales. For projects, it is about completed (and accepted) deliverables. Just as sales tend to have peaks, so does the schedule of deliverables: does the plan support that?

Flexibility needs to be built into the plan but in a way that allows than plan to be without padding making the team inefficient. But without “float” (the time between when a task could start and when it must start) the schedule would be so tight that if something goes wrong there is time for the team to fix it.

Combine these and you start to see where there is time and need for people planning: matching skills and CPD opportunity to the needs of the project.

Marketing is a the part of a business that focuses on identifying, understanding  and satisfying the customer. For a project, marketing can be a useful tool for awareness raising, market research and communication planning.

So far we’ve been talking about good management. The last two topics can be the launch pad for the “above average” bit of the performance.  New ways of doing things, reducing costs and improved quality: that is more than survival. Unfortunately, these can forgotten in rushed projects or projects. The project manager can gather lessons learned and make space for the team to make the project something special.

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