Monthly Archives: November 2010

Improving Service Delivery

This shot was taken in honor of one of the people in the group who visited me in Ottawa this week from The West Indies.

They were with me to learn about how to improve service delivery, and, at the beginning of the session, technology was the first thing on their minds. 

Success! By the end, technology was the last thing that they listed when preparing to improve service delivery. Not bad for a bunch who represented the IT department.

 
Improving Service Delivery 1
Improving Service Delivery 2

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Are you focused on climbing ladders or increasing your value?

Room at the top for the people with the white hats is getting scarce as the work force ages. Everyone wants a white hat and fewer people are willing to get their hands dirty. Meanwhile, the trend towards a flatter management structure continues. This reduces the need for white hats even more. What is a seasoned worker to do for advancement if there are no more ladders to climb? How does one increase their value? Your primary goal should be to move away from work that can easily be outsourced or automated and move towards activities that are not easily commoditized. Organizations need smart people who can shorten the time to achieve objectives, not simply good workers who can easily be replaced.

Are you focused on climbing ladders or increasing your value

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Project Management: High Value or Misguided Goals?

In an effort to reign in the spending on projects, many organizations have implemented formal project management practices. This makes sense from the perspective of ensuring that the right things are being done at the right time, in a controlled and fiscally responsible way. What doesn’t make sense is the extreme that some of these organizations go to in order to control project costs.

Project management should be a resource to the project. It should help the project stay on track and improve communication with stakeholders.

Certainly there is a place for project management in tracking costs, completeness, and making sure that the people working on the project know what tasks are next on the priority list, however, if technology teams are criticized for being too close to the technology and not business savvy enough, project managers can be criticized for being too close to the project management tools and methodologies that they use.

The value is not in the reporting. The value is in enabling decisions and navigating the roadblocks along the way so that the project team can reach the customers goals efficiently and effectively.

In my opinion, too much time is spent measuring the "burn rate" rather than removing the costly obstacles.

© Wayne McKinnon 2009. All rights reserved.


Posted in Where is the value? | Click Here to Share Your Thoughts