Drummond Report Calls for Value and Efficiency
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Drummond’s call for significant savings and reduction in government spending makes it essential to ensure value and efficiency. These key watch words will determine where to focus efforts. Project initiatives have notoriously been an area where significant improvements can be made quickly.
According to a report by the Centre for Business Practices over 42% of active initiatives are troubled, failing, or no longer will generate expected benefit. Often the leadership team finds out only after the situation has become so severe that it can’t be kept beneath the radar. By then the initiative may be beyond repair. In our current economic climate you can’t afford to carry that level of risk.
With early stage intervention where specific turnaround actions are implemented the report indicated 80% of these initiatives ultimately succeed and deliver the expected business benefits.
What better time than now to ensure the well-being and validity of your portfolio of strategic initiatives?
Three key areas to tackle are:
1. Tighten initiative portfolio management and governance
- Review your existing portfolio to ensure all of your existing initiatives fit with today’s strategy; include in flight initiatives as well as those waiting to initiate;
- Develop scenarios to ‘see’ different futures and determine initiatives for each scenario; if a scenario starts to take shape be ready to initiate quickly; make small tests or experiment with minimal investment or impact;
- Monitor the external environment to adjust your scenarios and optional initiatives;
- Identify and eliminate redundancy – often similar initiatives are executing at the same time;
- Review risk and return criteria to adapt for the new environment;
- Increase and improve governance.
2. Utilize audits or health checks
- Allow for early intervention to catch initiatives at risk of becoming trouble or challenged;
- Quickly assess initiatives and clear roadblocks;
- Don’t wait until the end of an initiative or when a crisis occurs, conduct a health check or audit after planning and at key stages of the initiative;
- Know when to pull the plug – if it no longer makes sense then stop. This will free up resources to move to other key initiatives that will deliver.
3. Tackle complexity before it tackles you
- Chop and chunk initiatives into shorter timeframes to provide immediate value while minimizing risk;
- Working on less allows the delivery of quality;
- Go back to basics: program and project management processes work – use them;
- Deploy skilled practitioners – availability is not a skill;
- Implement change management as a core competency; develop roadmaps to help drive change, create change.
“Why would one want to sustain the status quo?” asked Drummond. Keeping focus on the operational side is important to retain value and efficiency. Even more important is driving out the right initiatives to deliver results. There is no time to waste.
Click here to contact SPM for how to increase value and efficiency.