A growing number of major companies are following the lead of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to set aggressive targets for achieving net zero carbon emissions in their businesses. To hit those commitments, companies need to make important decisions about where to focus the time, energy, and money they have to invest in sustainability. It may […]
3 Reasons Why Good Decisions
Can’t Be Scored:
Why numbers lead teams astray in their most important decisions —
and what to do instead.
When my partner and I were driving through the Luxembourg countryside, we enjoyed the beautiful sights: scenic mountains with hilltop castles and lush forests. As night began to fall, the fog descended. At first, it was beautiful. Then visibility became more and more restricted. Relaxation turned into apprehension as we realized the increasing danger on […]
How Teams Can Find Focus, Even When They’re Overwhelmed:
Find your NUDs — those things that are New, Unique or Difficult — to find your focus
Recently, my thinking about Key Decisions has changed. I used to think that teams needed to address all their high impact/high unknown Key Decisions and that teams could be trusted to come up with the right ones within a few cycles of re-planning, even if they struggled during the integration event.
Are Gantt Charts Evil?
In March of 2021, Denmark announced that that they had approved the construction of an artifical island to supply offshore wind power. The island will collect power from offshore wind turbines to transform and transmit it to the Danish electrical grid. The first stage won’t be operational until 2033. A huge project like this will probably have an overall project director, and an army of project managers working on the pieces of the puzzle. Although project management is waste by definition, it is also the epitome of necessary waste for a massive infrastructure project like this.
But this project also has a lot of unknowns. It’s the first time anything like this has been attempted. The group needs solutions that have not yet been invented. If the team attempts to run the entire project with traditional project management tools, they are likely to disappoint. According to researchers at Oxford University, large-scale projects like this have only a 0.2% chance of being delivered on time, on budget with the expected performance.
Why Advanced R&D Teams Need to be Connected to Their Customers
On one trip I took prior to the pandemic, I visited an Advanced R&D lab and saw a lot of cool new technology. It was all stuff that I could see myself using some day. The team was working hard to overcome technical obstacles that were in the way of commercialization. These obstacles were real […]