Annie Duke

There’s no problem with tackling low-hanging fruit. Eventually, you have to. But you better make sure that you solve for the bottleneck first — because every bit of low-hanging fruit you tackle creates an illusion of progress and sunk cost problems.

Inside the Black Box Crucial to Megaproject Success

Despite their importance to the global economy, most megaprojects fail to be delivered on budget or schedule. Here’s how managers could improve on that dismal record.

Martin Reeves, Arthur Boulenger, Adam Job

Organizations tend to neglect or downplay the ingenuity component in change initiatives. Leaders often prefer instead a simpler, mechanistic view of the world, which assumes they can easily specify and control actions using project management techniques. Moreover, organizations are often averse to change. Ideas like “breaking the rules” or “reinventing the organization” are less accepted in typical projects—and a departure from the norm will often … [ Read more ]

Ulrich Pidun, Sebastian Stange

While post-completion audits for large projects are common in many companies, the feedback into decision making typically happens only sporadically. Advanced companies review not only projects but also past decisions. The head of corporate strategy at a large industrial conglomerate puts it this way: “We made our biggest losses from moves not made. So we also explicitly review opportunity cost mistakes.”

Ulrich Pidun, Sebastian Stange

Understanding the underlying risks should be a particular focus in project selection. Research has shown time and again that human beings are weak at risk assessment, but some techniques can help. A good starting point can be to frame the discussion in terms of a base question: What do we need to believe in to make this an attractive investment? This framing can help uncover … [ Read more ]

The Project Economy Has Arrived

Research shows that only 35% of the projects undertaken worldwide are successful—which means we’re wasting an extravagant amount of time, money, and opportunity. To take advantage of the new project economy, companies need a new approach to project management: They must adopt a project-driven organizational structure, ensure that executives have the capabilities to effectively sponsor projects, and train managers in modern project management.

Jaleh Rezaei

Tracking the difference between ‘actual’ and ‘target’ is a really important part of your dashboarding process. My team jokingly calls this delta ‘the shame,’ because that’s what drives them to reflect and iterate.

Tim Koller, Dan Lovallo

[A premortem is where] at the start of a project, you imagine that the project went wrong and think about what could have caused that result. You put yourself into the future and, in a non-judgmental way, think of all the things that could derail the project. It creates a safe way for people to discuss their concerns without being perceived as criticizing the project. … [ Read more ]

Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight JTBD Framework

In my work as an angel investor and advisor, I often find myself dishing out the same advice: Do the work to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable. That requires an incredibly deep understanding of the user, their hopes, and their motivations, instead of taking the easier path of operating off of untested assumptions.

Many entrepreneurs may do this … [ Read more ]

Nikhyl Singhal

Here’s my simple definition of product/market fit: The value of each user is greater than the cost of bringing them into the product. It means there are enough customers out there and you can efficiently bring them in. […] There are a lot of product/market fit definitions out there that focus on how many users love you. But that misses a key ingredient: the profitability … [ Read more ]

Jiaona “JZ” Zhang

Your alpha group is the one that already loves you, that would even love your MVP. It’s your mom who will love anything you make. On the other end of the spectrum, your GA is far more skeptical. Your GA is much harder to please. Their trust is hard to earn and even harder to regain once lost. Your beta is your sweet spot for … [ Read more ]

I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.

Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer.
 
Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers.
 
MVPs are too M and almost never V. Customers see that, and hate it. It might be great for the product team, but it’s bad for … [ Read more ]

The Project Revolution: How to Succeed in a Project Driven World

Only a select few projects deliver their purpose, meet their expected goals, achieve sustainable benefits, satisfy most stakeholders, meet their deadlines and stay within their original financial budget. So what is the secret? What can we learn from the thousands of failed projects? And how can we develop a framework or tool that guarantees, or at least significantly increases the chance of, project success?

Many of … [ Read more ]

The 4 Types of Project Manager

Your organization’s growth opportunities fall into four different categories, and in order to develop your business in a commercially sustainable manner, you need four specific types of project manager to pursue them. The employee types and the growth opportunities that they are best at pursuing can be positioned along two dimensions: (1) Is the growth opportunity in line with our existing strategy? (2) Can a … [ Read more ]

Gina Gotthilf

The simplest way to implement an idea effectively may not be the simplest way to implement that idea. “Minimum” comes first in “MVP,” but “viable” is at its core.

Stuart Crainer

Project management sounds straightforward and somewhat traditional. A lot of managers are uncomfortable with these two things. They want something new and complicated, something that carries status.

The reality that project management is complex, multifaceted, and universal seems to have passed people by. The fact that project management is not really taught at business schools perpetuates this.

How to Prioritize Your Company’s Projects

In over 20 years of experience in prioritizing, selecting, and managing projects, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez has developed a simple framework that he calls the “Hierarchy of Purpose.” It is a tool that executive teams can use to help them prioritize strategic initiatives and projects.

Controlling the Enterprise

Which projects are in the best interest of our company? What is the best use of its existing and future financial and operational capacities? Alternatively, which projects should we stop, suspend or delay in case of sudden economic downturn or change in our strategy? Providing the means to answer those questions more rationally is precisely the objective of project portfolio management (PPM). PPM is the … [ Read more ]

Making Better Decisions About the Risks of Capital Projects

A handful of pragmatic tools can help managers decide which projects best fit their portfolio and risk tolerance.

Why are MBAs Not Teaching About Project Management?

Senior executives seem to neither understand project management nor regard it as an important means of business strategy execution. Only a few top business school’s Masters of Business Administration (MBAs) teach project management as part of their core course curriculum. I have spent the last 10 years trying to understand why.