People in education often like to implement “programs.” In fact, we call this syndrome “program-itis” because it leads to inflammation of the budget. As with many corporation, we see people who want to improve a situation decide to follow “best practices” without verifying that these are, in fact, best practices. They can only be best […]

Over the years, we have heard executive level individuals cry out for cultural change in their organizations without understanding the ramifications of what they are saying. With cultural transformation as usually touted, we are talking about massive levels of upheaval. The upheaval approach can be counterproductive if it does little more than produce a culture […]

A project comes to an end and now we are in a position to really critique or learn how things went. Ideally, we were learning all along, and now we have the final opportunity to review the project.  If our organization has heavy project management influences, we may have a “white book” that captures the […]

Knowing a risk exists and not taking action is similar to standing on the tracks watching as the train nears.   You must spend time creating alternative plans in the event the train does, in fact, come.   It has been our observation that most project teams, under the pressure to deliver to the current plan, do […]

I have been having a running discussion with one of my colleagues regarding project and cost, specifically the cost of a project that is under consideration for termination.  A project is going through a gate review. During this review we find that the objectives are not met by this phase and further action has little […]

There is a saying: “if you change form, fit or function, you change the part number.” On the surface this seems like a good saying. People use this saying as rule of thumb to determine if a new part number is required.  Taking out new part numbers cost the company some administrative time and effort […]

There are a number of quality tools that can help to evoke the risks that may be associated with your project. One such tool usually associated with cause and effect is the Ishikawa diagram. We can use this tool to explore risks as well. We will explore what happens (cause) and how it will impact […]

We can use value analysis and value engineering techniques to improve our product cost structure and ultimately our value proposition.  The analysis phase of this activity is called value analysis. The design phase of this activity is called value engineering.  We are a bit constrained during these activities since as we have a product already […]

We perform risk audits on projects to ascertain whether we are deviating from the desired budget, schedule, and quality levels we specified at the start of the project. At the 50,000 foot level, risk auditing looks like the following: Define the problem Choose an audit team leader Choose an audit team or let the leader […]