StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Best Practice Article

Tactical Execution Best Practice 3 – Timely Reporting of Activity Status

Rarely does unique, creative, or exploratory work complete on-time and on-budget (accounting for personnel, material, and financial resources). Although planners make every effort to accurately predict task needs, the many variables and uncertainties associated with these types of tasks make highly accurate planning nearly impossible. Even highly repetitive tasks can suffer from unforeseeable circumstances that delay their performance or raise costs. Subsequently, buffers are often added to work plans to accommodate for the uncertainty. At times, these buffers aren’t enough. On other occasions, excess time and/or resources remain. Only through timely communication of activity status can managers proactively prioritize and adjust their operations or project plans to accommodate the unknown and recover excess time and resources.

StrategyDriven Project Management Best Practice Article

Project Management Best Practice 4 – Team Calendar

Project complexity seems to increase exponentially with team size. Larger teams require greater division of work and additional managers and supervisors to oversee these disparate efforts. Subsequently, the number of meetings increases to coordinate and align efforts between work groups, communication with stakeholders, and gather requirements and ideas from the organization’s subject matter experts. Absent meeting coordination, team members and line organization sponsors and participants become increasingly double and triple booked; causing individual frustration and diminishing the team’s effectiveness credibility.

Managing Your Virtual Team

Management and Leadership – Managing Your Virtual Team

People used to think that “working from home” was code for “getting paid to eat Oreos in pajamas”, but with the recent recession, getting paid at all isn’t anything to take chances with. If you’re engaged in virtual project management you can’t physically just drop in to check on your workers – at least, not […]

StrategyDriven Succession and Succession Planning Podcast | StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 11 - An Interview with Marshall Goldsmith, author of Succession

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 11 – An Interview with Marshall Goldsmith, author of Succession

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 11 – An Interview with Marshall Goldsmith, author of Succession explores the personal issues that arise during executive succession and how to overcome them; achieving a positive outcome for the departing leader, the successor, and the organization.

Leadership Inspirations – A Call for Innovation

“To get what we’ve never had, we must do what we’ve never done.” Anonymous “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein Theoretical physicist, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (1921) Innovation, the act of introducing a new product, service, and/or method, […]

StrategyDriven Management Observation Program Best Practice Article

Management Observation Program Best Practice 1 – Immediate Feedback

Can you remember what you ate for dinner last night? Last week? Neither can many others. How well then will a worker remember the nuances of his or her job performance days or weeks earlier on which feedback is now being provided? Probably not very well.

StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 27 – Making the Mission Measurable

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag posts on the StrategyDriven website. Episode 27 – Making the Mission Measurable elaborates on Strategic Planning Best Practice 1 – Make […]

StrategyDriven Business Communications Best Practice Article

Business Communications Best Practice 1 – Communicate 7 Times, 7 Different Ways

All too often vital communications go unheard, creating workforce discontent, reducing organizational effectiveness, and alienating clients. Why with today’s advanced communication mechanisms do so many messages go unnoticed? One answer is that people are so overwhelmed with modern society’s messaging that they sometimes don’t recognize the importance of a single announcement; filtering it out as noise. Another reason is that not all people meaningfully receive information in the same way and some important messages are only sent through channels not likely to be received. To overcome both these challenges, managers should consider communicating important messages seven times using seven different media.

StrategyDriven Project Management Best Practice Article

Project Management Best Practice 3 – Line Management Project Ownership

Whether creating a new product or service or upgrading an internal process or software application, all projects fundamentally represent a change to the way an organization does business. This change is represented by two components, the technical object being added or altered and the emotional acceptance and implementation of the new technical object by the workforce. While each change component is equally important to the project’s success, it is the later that often poses the most risk of failure. To reduce this risk and thereby increase the project’s likelihood of success requires strong line ownership especially on the part of executives and managers.

Leadership Inspirations – Only Change is Constant

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) Irish poet and playwright “Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.” Bernard Berenson (1865 – 1959) American art historian Seemingly harsh words, but consider… Consistency is an interesting word. We often think of it as […]