Process Innovation

Then in a fun ceremonial process, the leader of each workgroup passes each project Post-It to me.

Behind me, I have a large whiteboard with these rows:

• Strategy and leadership
• Brand and corporate communications
• Business unit management
• Marketing operation
• Creative and agency workflows
• Web content operation
• IT infrastructure

And then I place each of these 45-day projects in a row and sequence them:

• Do-it-now project
• Do-it-next project
• Do-it-later project
• May be / some day project

In a really fun and engaging half-hour or so, we produce an 18- to 24-month master project roadmap that says, “Here are all the 45-day single-person or two-person projects that will most move this firm toward realizing the five or so enabling operational capabilities of your visionary future-state.”

And the workgroup socialized each project, and filtered each one through all of the hindering forces of the firm.

I submit that that kind of bottom-up project planning — with noses rubbed in all of the hindering forces — really brings a crispness and energy to exactly how a particular organization can and must move forward and attain a future-state capability with 5 or 6 enabling capabilities.

Now, on the second day, with a small project management team, we examine each of these 45-day projects and we develop one-page quick plans for each one of those projects.

We give each project a good project name and one-sentence description. We state a one-sentence purpose - “How does this relate to the strategy map of a company?”, two to five guiding principles, a concrete and measurable success outcome, a few key performance indicators of progress, resources needed, and a preliminary budget.

We have found that these simple one-page quick plans provide enough focus and grounding for a more formal scoping of project-management activity, knowing that a group has already socialized each project.

In a few cases, we discover that the simple project actually represents the tip of a large iceberg - a whole bunch of factors that exist underwater and out of sight.

This usually requires a more formal risk-mitigation planning process - standard stuff - for drilling into all the things that could go wrong. This usually entails a heavy-weight project team and a structured process to complete.

But, heck, we produce a socialized, bought-in 18-month roadmap with 40 to 65 projects in just under two days.

Our clients tell us that this two-day process produced more value than a $250,000 consulting project by a traditional professional services firm.

Needless to say, we charge a lot less than that