Robert Ringer has a new book out about taking action. The title is ACTION, nothing happens until something moves. In it, the author states that people are in a constant state of homeostasis. That is, the ability or tendency of an organism or a cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes.
This means that bottom line, we hate change and do almost everything in our power to maintain the status quo. It doesn’t matter if everyone is in agreement that change is necessary, the homeostasis preference trumps the human understanding and desire to change. It’s why change is so difficult for so many.
For project management success, a good program manager needs not only to fight the corporate structure but also the personal desire of stakeholders to cling to the status quo. This is what makes project management, expecially in larger companies such a challenge.
Listen to the bleating of coming from corporate boardrooms and you would think they’re being lead to slaughter. The wailing and knashing of teeth is caused believe it or not by a law that holds the people who run corporations repsonsible for how they’re operated. So what we have is a law that REQUIRES CEO’s to actually know and certify that the what the company is stating in financial records is accurate.
And for that, the CEO’s who for the last several decades have justified their HUGELY obscene paychecks becuase of their great repsonsiblity crying because the government had the audacity to actually hold them responsible.
Business Week puts the average large-company compliance price tag at upward of $35 million. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, says that the billions spent nationally on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance weighs on the stock market and is like “throwing buckets of sand in the gears of a market economy.”
What market economy is it that simply wants to hold those in authority responsible for the information provided to the public? Any healthy, well run company should have many, if not all the controls in place that are needed for SOX compliance. Complaints about the cost of compliance could possibly be used as an indicator of the general operational integrity of the company.
Just a thought
SCOPE is the start and end points of a project. Assume that you have a project working on a customer service issue like long call hold times. One possible reason for long hold times is that the telephone tech needs to look up something in the finance department database. Now this database is so messed up that we’re lucky to get anything out of it at all.
So the problem is: Should fixing the potential “root cause” of the problem (the finance database) be part of the changes to deal with the customer service issue above or not? That is SCOPE!
How far out of the direct problem area do we go to address the issue and problem identified? Cross functional issues are much more complex and complicated that those within a single business unit or group. At issue is how successful any project will be with a scope that’s simply to large.
To large a scope and the risk of doing the project increases due to the potential for change in corporate or management focus during the lengthy project effort. The best opportunity for success of any project is one that has a definite beginning and end scope. A clearly identifiable list of out of scope issues goes a long way in keeping a project on track, on time and on budget.