“Make it so”
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise
Last post I wrote about the importance of identifying your ideal pathway within the organisation, and gave a brief overview of the projects you need to consider when seeking to make your mark.
For the benefit of refreshing your memory, the 12 profitable projects are outlined in the model below:
You will notice that the projects are bounded by three broad “levels” of improvement progression (foundation, transition and transformation), and four broad category “pillars “ (customer, product, systems and people) that set the context and scope for each projects’ activity.
A brief description of each project follows:
Project Delivery: normally for operational leaders who run the company’s factories or production houses, this project aims to achieve 100% DIFOT (Delivery In Full, On Time). However, the principles can also be applied to any leadership role that has committed to project outcomes within a specified time frame, as any leader should subscribe to delivering on what was promised when it was promised.
Project Stability: normally the purview of customer service departments, stability is all about delivering a 7 Star experience to the customer. It aims for “zero rejects” all of the time, in every step of your customer service process, ensuring that your organisation is so easy to do business with that it creates raving fans out of your customers who are married to your brand.
Project Improvement: Business Analysts and corporate communications specialists are normally found in this space. Improvement is all about developing a systematic and superior system of performance that delivers financial results. It ensures clear, consistent communication at all levels, across all departments using common terms and language
Project Flexibility: HR Departments are where project flexibility normally is focused. It seeks to ensure that: employee skills issues are never a cause for business disruption; that employees are aligned and focused to serve clients profitably; and that all levels of the organisation drive ROI through their skills.
Project Proposition: The product developers and product marketing normally deal with activities in this project area. The goals are to: create an offering that can drive a superior margin, increase in sales, that cannot or will not be copied, and that solves a problem that the industry creates for its customers.
Project Evolution: this is normally a cross-departmental initiative. The goals are to: reduce the cost of supply of the product every single year; to improve the flow of product through the supply chain year on year; and to deploy these improvements in a stable and controlled fashion throughout the product lifecycle.
Project Acceleration: also known as fundamental cost reduction, quality and supply chain managers normally sit in this project area. The goals are to: significantly reduce costs year on year in a controlled fashion; to enhance quality via the elimination of wasteful processes, practices and products, and to leverage the expertise of the supply chain to drive profitability
Project Mitigation: Occupational health and safety personnel normally lead this project. The objectives are to systematically identify, prioritise and actively reduce all hazard to the business; to systematically improve the personal safety of all people in the business; and to drive ROI upwards through the elimination of waste and the refinement of business process.
Project Creation: this project draws on the revenue producing roles within the business (marketing for demand generation, sales for closing prospective business). Creation is about aligning the sales and marketing functions of the business. It creates a “plan on a page” that provides agreed metrics and dashboards to track and continually improve performance, and system that allows for continual application of design thinking and innovation in marketing campaigns and sales methodologies.
Project Disruption: normally your R&D functions drive this area, along with product development. The goals are to: develop a systematic approach to commercially viable IP creation; to create distinctive and commercially attractive products to replace existing products and services; and to establish product development as a key strategic asset of the business.
Project Construction: IT departments are the hub of this project. It aims to: provide transparency of performance across the business; deliver real time systems to prioritise and guide contact with clients and prospects; and create a measurement system to drive and assess organisational performance improvement.
Project Generation: essentially your internal leadership development program that ensures profitable organic growth by having employees that are deeply, emotionally engaged with your brand so they engage your customers. The goals are to: systematically engage staff by tailoring roles to each person’s unique talents and strengths; developing a story about your mission that aligns and energises your people; create a methodology for identifying talent from within the organisation to develop the next generation of leaders internally as often as possible; and to build a culture that is mature enough to hire for attitude, train for skills and promote on character.
As the levels suggest, it is very difficult to sustain high performance in the transformation projects without a strong foundation and stable transition level. Also, the progression from ignorance to mastery in each project normally starts at delivery and ends at generation. That said, leaders can commence initial planning work in almost any project area prior to rolling them out across the organisation.
I’ll illustrate with a real world example.
One of my clients is a Marketing Director for Asia Pacific with a global manufacturing company. So his primary project area of focus is project creation – the top left box in the twelve projects. His key challenges are that:
- The marketing function is more mature and thus mis-aligned with the sales function (project creation);
- Key account management and customer service issues are continually impacting on the sales force’s ability to win new business (project stability);
- Their DIFOT can drop below 90%, impacting on revenue generation and profitability (project delivery);
- There is a major product initiative that is not yet mature which they are trying to generate demand for which is continually impacting on sales force productivity (project proposition);
- He has built an excellent dashboard to track performance of his own role using cutting edge technology, but his IT department is lagging in performance (project construction)
- He leads a cross functional team which sits in three different countries that has recently added two new team members, and does not know their unique talent profiles and how to get them playing to their strengths (project generation).
What is clear from this example is that a lack of performance in project areas that are adjacent to or in the the same column or row as your main project area can have a significant impact on your own ability to perform and meet your agreed targets. This is especially difficult when it is a project area that is two moves away – in his case, delivery (marketing almost never sees the inside of a factory) and construction (marketing has not traditionally talked to IT).
So the game plan for this executive to improve his pathway within the organisation was to identify three – four project areas of focus where he had sufficient authority within the organisation to develop a project scope to lead a change program that would significantly improve the maturity level of that project.
We identified that his primary project had to be within project creation: improving the alignment between the marketing and sales departments so that demand generation and lead conversion activities were enabling them to achieve realistic targets. He was already achieving his key metrics, so his role here was to support the sales department by creating the best possible dashboards for them to continually track and measure their own performance – a project construction activity.
His secondary project was project generation - to focus on developing his team into one based on their unique talents and strengths so their performance would increase and they would be seen as an exemplar within the business.
Notice that these two projects are in the same horizontal line as project creation, but still fall within his authority and span of control.
His third project was work to improve the systems that supported project proposition, so that the sales force could more rapidly produce proposals that would generate new business. Note that this is in the same column as project creation, so he has a legitimate role to play in helping to shape this project as a pre-cursor to creating marketing campaigns that generate demand for the proposition.
His fourth project was project stability. This is the most challenging, because it does not sit in either the same column or row as his role, but was continually impacting on his ability to perform his role due to the way customer service issues negatively impacted on the sales and account management functions.
This would be considered a stretch project – one that is outside the core of a leader’s role which requires and matrix (cross functional) team to execute on.
Fortunately, one of the company’s key strategic objectives is that they become “easy to do business with”, which is a key outcome of project stability. So he was able to position the project as one that his technology suite could create the dashboards to begin to track and measure customer service within the organisation (project construction), and measurably demonstrate the positive business impact of how a reduction in customer service issues in project stability would significantly improve the performance in project creation.
The project received initial executive endorsement and as of this writing was now awaiting a formal sponsor for reporting purposes.
So you can see how an intrapreneur can significantly increase the potential pathways for themselves within the organisation by being highly strategic about which projects in the game plan they choose to focus their efforts on.
The opportunity you have is to go through the same process of analysis in your own role and the organisation’s level of project maturity, to identify what profitable projects are the best ones for you to focus on for your personal “game plan” of projects. Normally at least one project will be able to be completely justified within the scope of your role and current job description. Ideally, the other 2-3 projects will be in project areas adjacent to your role, so you can expand your influence.
The benefit of championing projects yourself is that it puts you in the driver’s seat and gives you the potential to select your own sponsor and project team of super talented people to deliver on the project. Naturally, the risk is that you will raise your own personal profile within the organisation and potentially expose yourself to the internal politics at play. Ultimately, it comes down to your judgement and the counsel of your mentors as to where you should focus your discretionary efforts on which projects.
So that's how you link your pathway within the organisation to projects that will have an impact. Next, I'll write more about how to identify the super-talented inside and outside your organisation so you can build project teams that really rock.
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Nathanael Small is passionate about strengths, performance and the world of the intrapreneur - the team leader or leader of leaders within the organisation - helping them move their career from high potential to peak performance.
Nathanael has over 25 years of acquired wisdom in leadership development. His unique perspective and combination of skills allows him to work with intrapreneurs to realise their ambition to be deeply engaged and leading with their strengths.