#SOOP-1 A project is a decision making architecture

The purpose of a project is to enable a return on investment by pursuing an opportunity or avoiding a threat. A project consumes an investment to change the current status quo or alter change that would otherwise occur. We deliver projects by taking actions that we posit will create a desired outcome. For every cause we trigger the list of outcomes (plural) is more or less what we intended but rarely if ever exactly what we either intended or needed.

The upshot is projects MUST be managed, at least in part re-actively – reactive means ‘act on the basis of a trigger’, which means observe, reflect, synthesis or analyse, hypothesis, act, observe, reflect…

What we create when we put a successful project together is a ‘mechanism’ or ‘architecture’ for making decisions that establishes unconscious competence across a team with a baseline and then responds situationally to current context with reference to a goal.

You could call this ‘agile’ and, in part, it is but it isn’t hype, it isn’t the whole solution and it isn’t a new silver bullet. Projects do not perform well in the real, commercial world for several reasons one of which is how we train people in project management. To improve PM needs an extension to existing approaches to projects that is #pm_ngt.

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

See our range of course offerings.

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

See our range of course offerings.

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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