Page 125 - 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!
Here are my favourite three stories of this alchemy: