Category: Change Management

Implementing the right project management software should make planning, executing, and monitoring initiative progress a breeze. They create a single source of truth and transparency, so that all stakeholders have visibility into the progress of each initiative and where key resources are allocated. With a range of features including flexible project views, as well as analytics, project tracking and resourcing, project management software is critical for creating a smooth workflow within your business. When you start to think about implementing projects, it’s important that you choose the best project management tool for your team.

Additionally, organisations that invest in project management tools save 28x more money than organisations that do not, and 77% of high-performing businesses use project management tools (Source: PMI).

What Is A Project Management Tool?

A project management tool is software that help teams plan, manage, and optimise resources across an organisation. The key features of any project management tool are:

•  Task Tracking and Assigning – A key feature of any project management tool is the ability to assign and track tasks across their lifecycle.
• Initiative Subcategories – These tasks need to be assigned to specific initiatives, so most project management tools have both parent initiatives (a large-scale initiative that smaller initiatives fall under), and child initiatives (the smaller initiative that falls under the parent).
• Collaboration and Accountability – Project management software allows enterprise-wide collaboration on key tasks, and accountability through the ability to monitor how each initiative is progressing.

Why use a Project Management Tool?

Choosing the right Project management tool is critical for organisations to ensure a project is successfully implemented from concept through to delivery. A project management tool can also help keep teams stay organised and ensure that processes are followed and provide a clear overview of all activity happening in relation to an initiative, project, or task at any given time. Cloud-based project management tools also allow teams to communicate clearly and quickly, in real time and from anywhere, which streamlines the process of remote working arrangements, saving the average employee up to 498 hours per year (Source: PMI).

Key Features to look for in Project Management Software:

• Team Collaboration – Simplifies collaboration and creates a virtual workplace, encouraging collaborative project planning and work-streams for all key stakeholders.
• Task Management – Ability to assign and prioritise tasks by deadlines and importance, as well as the ability to automate notifications about task activities and deadlines.
• Forward Planning – Break up large initiatives into smaller tasks and set clear goals and timelines to work towards. Define and manage requirements for each initiative. Schedule initiative duration, milestones, and deadlines.
• Workload and Resource Management – Get an overview of current and upcoming work commitments across teams and projects. Assign team members and allocate resources based on availability and capacity. Ability to balance workloads amongst team members. Track project budget, cost-to-date and expected outcome per project.
• Monitoring and Reporting – Overview to monitor how all initiatives are performing. Dashboard that provides an instant overview of each initiative, status, progress, and performance. Centralised data that provides a single source of truth for reporting. Identify issues and manage any risks.

MakeItHappen is a cloud-based programme and project management solution that allows organisations to effectively manage and deliver large volumes of projects. It ticks all the boxes for a leading project management solution, including collaboration, task management, tracking, reporting, and many more.

Get a demo of MakeItHappen to learn how it can help your business deliver more value from projects.

Click here to book a demo today. 

We’ve just experienced the fastest stock market decline, ever.

Source: The Irrelevant Investor

The challenges now facing our industries range from:

• existential threats (Travel, Tourism, Hospitality, Shopping Centres)
• explosive increases in demand and required production capacity (Consumer Goods, Commodity Foods, Medical Consumables and Equipment)
• supply chain breakdown (Retail, Manufacturing), and
• prolonged downturns (Resources, Residential Construction).

Travel lockdowns and isolation procedures will create challenges for human resource management, technology, and information security.

How fast can you respond? And what’s holding you back?

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Patrick Collison is building a fascinating list of “examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together”, or put another way, some of the fastest projects in history.

A couple of examples from the growing list:

Apollo 8. On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later. Source: Apollo Spacecraft Chronology.

Disneyland. Walt Disney’s conception of “The Happiest Place on Earth” was brought to life in 366 days. Source: Under Construction: A look inside Walt Disney’s Disneyland.

iPod. Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell.

What drives a fast project?

Is it people? Scope? Tools?

Change is hard. We know just how hard it can be.

We’ve been working on and in change programmes for over 20 years. We have seen great successes (and failures), and the weird grey zone between the two.

It’s well known that many projects fail to deliver on their objectives…and if *projects* are failing frequently, what about the *programmes* that they make up?

Well, most change programmes also fail to deliver on their objectives in their original timeframe (in fact it’s about 70%).

And there’s a lot a stake, especially when it comes to the large-scale change programmes that we specialise in helping (also known as transformations).

Change programmes at scale have to deliver improvements across multiple parts of the business, under tight timeframes. Enterprise-scale programmes can be initiated with a massive objective to deliver large-scale change across multiple parts of the business. They have to rapidly form teams, structures, and processes, leveraging the existing capabilities of the business and adding new capabilities where they find gaps.

Whether you are trying to help merge two companies together, to achieve a step-change in productivity and capability, have to significantly reduce your costs, or are trying to take the enterprise to the next level with a digital transformation, the consequences of failing to deliver the full benefits are frightening.

Transformations and change programmes fail in lots of different ways, and some of the main ones are:

How do change programmes fail?

And whilst there’s lots of ways that programmes can fail, there’s only a few main reasons *why* they fail:

– Management don’t demonstrate change and leadership behaviours
– Employees resist the change
– Inability to manage scale of change
– Inadequate resources

So what can we do about it?

Our experience and our research shows that there are a couple of key things that some change programmes do which dramatically increase their likelihood of success.

Change the programme as the programme changes
– Issue: recognise that ramp up is different to steady state
– Solution: evolve the focus and tempo of the programme as you move through different cycles

Focus on delivering the top ten areas of value
– Issue: If top ten initiatives are off-track, unlikely to achieve objectives regardless of health of rest of programme
– Solution: Ensuring progress in top ten helps build confidence in broader programme 

Do the doing, not the reporting
– Issue: PMO can’t provide adequate assistance because they are drowning in updating and reporting on what happened in the past
– Solution: create a light-touch approach that focuses on key information and allows PMO to directly support change

Provide help to struggling areas early
– Issue: Initiatives that struggle to gain traction and deliver results often struggle from the very beginning, but could be put back on track if early intervention was applied.
– Solution: Use a structured approach of hygiene factors assessment and reviews to identify struggling initiatives early.

Cascade reviews at the right level
– Issue: Change programmes get bogged down in multiple levels of meetings and reviews, or alternately lack of oversight allows surprises to happen.
– Solution: Use cascading Bottom-up and top-down reviews to apply the right amount of scrutiny across the programme.

Help everyone understand how they fit in
– Issue: Staff can often have change fatigue and struggle to understand how what they are be asked to do contributes
– Solution: Effective communication to staff and celebrating wins can help keep everyone focused how they are helping deliver the end goal.

We have worked hard to build our learnings into MakeItHappen, our programme management solution.

Learn more about how MakeItHappen can support successful change programmes for your company.

Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash