Risk management
Risk management
Securing the commitment
Building trust can only be achieved by consistently demonstrating an ability to deliver solutions to customers needs. Such trust can be lost quickly, by inconsistent behaviors, misunderstood motives of leaders, or when change occurs within the environment where your track record was established.
Tell story of friend who consulted for customer of Malcolm Baldridge recipient. Dilemna was with his review of estimate - nearly every aspect of project anticipated worst-case outcomes, so approch was very expensive. So he asked the customer, can you afford this? Their answer was, yes. So my friend's response was to recommend that they accept the estimate. Trust among stakeholders will allow better trade-offs to be made if estimates were overly aggressive.
Confronting the constraints of synergy initiatives
General Motors was first founded in 1908, and grew through mergers and acquisitions of separate Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet businesses. On Jan. 21, 1988, a senior General Motors executive, Elmer Johnson, wrote a memo which accurately anticipated GM's key challenge in transforming the company: “We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” After 80 years, those businesses still struggled to work together. Read more »
Translating abstract needs into concrete actions
The leadership and team members on development projects often use language whose meaning is ambiguous. Unraveling the possibilities underneath their different concepts can be quite challenging. But if you don't confront and solve those challenges, it can cause considerably more pain later, as these misunderstandings must eventually be reconciled.
Success in development endeavors relies upon effective communications. Such communications involves developing and agreeing on a common, foundational understanding of the underlying key concepts that are threaded through such projects. Achieving such understanding usually requires careful listening, disciplined and coherent integration, and reconciliation of the ideas being expressed by different stakeholders over time. It also requires clear and thorough probing into the implications behind their emerging meaning(s) and reasoning(s), in multiple situations, and under different scenarios. Read more »
Mission critical projects
To tell stories of importance of redundancy in critical systems design, and how that relates to projects.
The risks of risk management
Let's say you were not feeling well, and felt that you needed to go to the doctor for help. Let's also say that you had a history with this doctor in which your interactions tended to produce lists of all the things that might be wrong with you, but never produced any treatment for these candidate diagnoses. Let's say you were still offered regular follow-ups, to monitor the state of this situation, but your doctor was unable to sketch out a credible path which would lead you to improving your health. Would you still want to continue to see this doctor? Even if you felt that you might have a serious disease, wouldn't you ask yourself if you were already doing all the things that could be done?
Would you take the time to go back to the doctor, just to continue to monitor the progression of your disease? And would your decision likely also depend upon your perception of the seriousness of the disease? Finally, if your condition was indeed serious, but potentially untreatable, wouldn't you perhaps really rather not want to know? Read more »