Page 13 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Here are my favourite three stories of this alchemy:

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time-consuming and costly – this had all been replaced by Microsoft Teams and measurable cost-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