What do employers want from their employees: knowledge or competence? I visited a client recently who told me they were re-orienting their training because they needed people who can do things, they distinguished between “know how and know what”. Know how is knowledge, often raw and not contexualised, classically this knowledge is gained in a …
Tag archives: best practices
Is assurance the next big thing?
The next big thing I propose that assurance is the next big topic in programme and project management. I am reading more about it, customers are asking about it (though not yet for it!), and we have just finshed a new qualification for people doing project and programme assurance with our partner Aspire. The catalyst …
The failure dilemma for change management
The Dilemma What about the mythical 70% failure rate for change in organisations? This has been searched for quite dilligently in the literature by Mark Hughes; who concluded that although well reported by very respected reporters, there was very little substantial measurement data to support the reports. Hence it becomes an urban myth. The dilemma …
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Change Saturation
Too Much Change Many people in organisations are reporting that they are doing “too much change”. Which usually means they feel they are not able to cope with the changes they are being asked to carry out. To understand what this means we need to look at three forces going on in an organisation: The …
Where projects end and change begins
Change adds value to projects In a recent Prosci article the author provides useful questions to elicit the value of doing people change on top of a delivery project. I also find that many people in the project world just don’t get the ‘change’ bit. A large multinational company I have talked to wants to …
Does a change capability matter?
Good change is good for business I think the heading answers the question! A recent survey reported by McKinsey entitled ‘Why Implementation Matters‘ reports on the effect that strategy implementation has on a company. Strategy implementation is quite clearly stated as the ability to implement major change programmes. As you would expect with McKinsey they …
Middle managers to drive change
What does it take to succeed in change? Middle managers in most organisations have a huge influence over the success of organisational change. Most middle managers are passive about change; a few step up to delivering change; all of them need to be behind the change. Some recent blogs point to how to get middle …
Watch a blunder in action?
Universal Credit blunders on A number of recent news items and blog posts in the technical sphere are signposting the UK Government’s Universal Credit programme as the next Government blunder. See our recent blog posts on human bias and systemic problems lessons learned based on a recently published book by Prof. Anthony King and Sir …
Reporting bias and failure: lessons for sponsors
How do you know what’s going on? Some recent research into bias in reporting about project status has implications for change governance. Two recent examples of poor reporting have surfaced recently: the fiasco on the launch of the IT to support the US Government Health Care programme (Obamacare) and the under-performance of the Universal Credit …
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It's still the Senior Manager wot did it
Contributors to Change Success A recent email from Prosci about their 2013 survey (results published this year) lists the top seven contributors to change success. This is probably the most important result from the survey and the most widely reported. Top of the list, again, and by a large margin is ‘active and visible executive …