Page 126 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Necessity REALLY is the mother of invention

Business Analysts have been well placed to notice and quantify the things that their company had started
doing out of sheer necessity, but which were now delivering positive outcomes and results! Some of
which have been truly jaw-dropping – from better working practices to previously deliverables and
revenue streams. The challenge is to not lose these serendipities in the swamp of surviving and create a
mindset where your business is positioned to leverage these ‘opportunities’ and turn them into a
business plan moving forward
A BA friend had been eulogising about the benefits of a remote workforce for years but had been pushing
against a bolted boardroom door. Then, Work-From-Home (WFH) became government advice, and the
firm was forced to adopt it! She already had a base camp of data to show the potential benefit of WFH
but was now able to collate real-time actual data to support what she’d been recommending.

She quantified the cost savings of needing less office space and fewer parking spaces; she was able to
show how the benefits of greater flexibility for the workforce fed back into the business in terms of
productivity (for instance, when one working mum’s children’s school was forced to close due to a Covid-
19 case, the business lost thirty minutes of productivity as she popped up the road to collect her kids - as
opposed to the whole afternoon that would have been lost had she been working from the office which is
an hour’s drive away in the city centre); and the BA was able to demonstrate how much more accessible
everyone was for meetings (several firms shared the meeting rooms in the office block and booking one
was like a lottery, plus arranging staff to attend from remote sights was time-consuming and costly – this
had all been replaced by Microsoft Teams and measurable cost-saving data was easily gathered).

The point is that this BA had been saying that WFH had operational benefits for the best part of a decade.
Now is the time for businesses to double down on listening to what their BAs are telling them. They,
more than anyone in the business, have their finger on the pulse.

Clearing out the cupboard

One business leader, a Stoneseed client, told me how he’d taken the prospect of being home for long
periods to sort out the kitchen cupboard and how this had inspired him to take a helicopter view of the
business and have a clear out here too.

In the same way that he’d emptied the cupboard of food well past it’s best before date and replaced it
with fresh food he and the family would enjoy, he tasked his project team and business analysts with
assessing the value proposition of everything the firm was engaged in. The results were eye-opening!

There were product lines that were, like the beans in his cupboard, way past their ‘best before date’,
heritage relationships with clients that had become stale and were yielding less, processes that were out
of date, sales markets that were no longer delivering results proportionate to the effort expended, and
three entire revenue streams that were high effort / low return.

Again, most of this is what the PMs and BAs had been saying before the pandemic, they’d been making
savings like this routinely – as my client said, “Sometimes it takes something big to happen to make you
see the little things!”

Cutting your vintage cloth with new scissors

A number of Stoneseed’s clients have shared stories of how they have brought back some the things that
worked for them before the pandemic but applied new ways of delivering them.
“We realised that we’d thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” one client told us, “when we
abandoned a staff training programme that had really delivered results and benefits because of Covid.
The short-term saving, although necessary, would have a long-term negative effect in terms of