Interactions generate value.

Normal operations optimises return on capital in use. When change arrives, we invest – divert – some use of capital from benefit today to benefits tomorrow.

If there will be a positive Return On Investment then it makes sense to invest the most possible! Reality is that access to capital is limited. More money is easy; it is more shared skills and more relationships that are hard to expand in the short term. Most limiting can be capacity to absorb change. (More on that below).

So… mostly capital must be rationed. Competing calls for resource allocations are those that claim some new, unproved Bang-for-the-Buck AND middle management’s key focus* which is ‘keeping-the-shop-open’. Demands on available capital span all the day-to-day (or business-as-usual so proven) activities that generate current benefits as well as all (speculative/ unproven) investments in change.
*A symptom of bonus strategies insensitive to the needs from change.

The limiting form of capital is, most frequently, skilled people’s time. When we need to trade-off between ‘Run the Organisation’ versus ‘Change the Organisation’ your PM training needs to have given you techniques such as Business Bandwidth Analysis – one of many technique with tools within the pm_ngt transformational framework. pm_ngt also shares techniques and tools that address change resistance and change fatigue to enhance people’s ability to cope with change AND clear thinking about how to align motivations – i.e. appropriate bonus design.

Sprint-planning, burn-charts or critical path and team resource levelling are important…BUT they are insufficient to connect our typical mix of agile and predictive development groups to operational achievement of benefits.

To deliver benefits, the real skills need is less about project management, or at least not in isolation than it is about portfolio management. Portfolio management considers the sum total of demands on capital allocation between sustaining BAU and delivering change (or future-state-business-as-usual FS_BAU).

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Successful projects need a new approach and that approach is in our #pm_ngt transformational framework.

Find Out More.

ngt is ‘new generation thinking’.
How-to guidance for each layer of the organisation on how to interact with the layers below and above to facilitate decision making for change.
SOOP-1 A project is a decision making architecture…

ngt Is a powerful and intuitive ‘common-sense’ framework of techniques and tools to build on existing investments in p3m3. It integrates, fills the gaps and resolves the overlaps.

ngt Provides techniques to explore, crystallise and cascade vision.
Vision is real-time reaction to Market-place pressures plus Mission plus Values

ngt Includes board level techniques to describe, debate, select and cascade Vision. To correlate vision with strategy and resource availability and map to outputs, outcomes and benefit flows in CFO terms

ngt Helps middle management translate strategy to tactics plus resource allocations and milestones linked to sponsorship, problem resolutions or swift Issue Escalations to empowered decision makers (or it shows you early on “It would be wiser if we didn’t start”)

ngt Is an holistic regime for leading transformation
investments from both the hierarchy and time perspectives:
Board-room to boiler-room™ – (Govern-manage-deliver)
Light-bulb moment to steady-state benefits

ngt Provides conceptual foundations, vocabulary, roles, procedural framework and techniques that fill gaps and resolve overlaps from integrating best-of-breed solutions such as agile, PMBoK Guide®, PRINCE2® and Benefits realisation, sociology and psychology. A product set of business leadership and project management tools for governance over equity.

ngt’s acid test is, ‘is this relevant 2 reality?’ it is not an exercise in exam based ‘cram and forget’ CV building.

@pm_ngt

Find Out More.

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#SOOP are Simon’s Observations on Projects  –  Each one flows from the observation that gaining skills in delivering projects is like making soup