Page 12 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Creating more from less. PMs and BAs and the alchemy of post pandemic

business recovery

Less Is More.

We all know this saying!
It was apparently first popularised by minimalist
architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1940s and
has since been transformed into countless hackneyed
platitudes by advertisers, a song by Joss Stone, an
album by Marillion and the name of a tour by Natasha
Bedingfield – who knew?!

More recently, “Less Is More” has become the mantra
and reality for businesses and organisations. How
fortunate for those businesses that the resource for
facilitating the creation of less from more is either
already on the payroll or just a call away.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused great pain and suffering and before launching into a blog post
about how it has damaged many companies’ bottom-line and public sector budgets, I wanted to
acknowledge and send our best wishes to those personally affected, those that have lost loved ones
and those who are currently battling with or recovering from Covid-19. My thoughts are with you.

Business as usual in the new normal
The first challenge for businesses back in March 2020 was the change in consumer behaviour. Most
firms were affected negatively as individuals came to terms with their changing circumstances.

As a client told me, “Business expenditure and revenue is like a food chain: the consumer earns a
living from ‘business Z’ and shops at ‘business A’; ‘business A’ buys from ‘business B’, ‘business B’
spends a little of this revenue with ‘business C’, ‘business C’ is buoyed by market confidence and
invests in the services of ‘company D’ and so on and so forth, round and round the cycle goes – until
it doesn’t!”

The ripple effect was like a wave of negativity as each link in the business food chain cut their costs
and tried to do more with less - the pandemic had impacted business revenue at every level and
most organisations were in survival mode.

Project Managers and Business Analysts – The alchemists of post pandemic business growth
As a provider of resources and talent through our Project Management as a Service (PMaaS) and
Business Analysis as a Service (BAaaS) models, at Stoneseed we were buzzing as we started to hear
how these sectors were driving positive business change in the difficult circumstances.

Project Managers and Business Analysts were like alchemists! They were making gold out of
seemingly nothing! In reality, they were just better than anyone else at identifying the value and
potential of this ‘nothing’ and creating the best environments to deliver the greatest outcomes from
it – in other words – they were doing what PMs and BAs have quietly been doing forever!