Still Chasing Sign-off for Next Year's Budget?
Are you currently going through the exercise of what's in or out of your project list for next year?
I've been there and frankly it's never a satisfying experience for any participant in the process. Estimated Project CAPEX spend: £9m. Budget: £2m. What gets cut and how do you decide? Darts? Endless rounds of governance meetings that argue the relative merits of projects only to be over-ruled by the CEO? As a consequence of this, the actual budget for next year may not even get approved until three months into the new year, giving 9 months to deliver 12 months worth of work! How did we get here? Below I list some common challenges that contribute to this scenario and suggest some possible though not easy remedies.
1) Executives request technology resources that don't align to corporate strategy or the corporate strategy is open to interpretation.
2) There are conflicting or duplicate project requests made to the technology function.
3) The inability of executives to communicate their vision beyond prescriptive project requests or without sufficient notice.
4) Too much demand overwhelming the technology function.
5) There are projects not delivering the value anticipated, being late or over budget.
6) Business cases approved on a “first past the post” basis with CAPEX left unspent at the end of the year.
7) Projects or services not being measured on the value defined.
Observations
You Pay For What You Get.
If the executive board want to see more reliability and consistency in the delivery of their programmes, many of which require technology enablement, they need to fund adequately the following aspects:
- Upstream research and feasibility.
- Ongoing measurement and review of performance
- Capacity for continuous improvement.
Rushing isn’t Necessarily Progress.
My research suggests that while many organisations function at a certain level of maturity, they don't perform at a high enough level to drive sustained long-term competitive advantage. This is driven also by a lack of skill.
In addition, reducing the project work in progress is fundamental to help people focus on what is core to survival and growth. Starting projects may feel good to all concerned, Finishing the right projects feels even better.
Enabling Sustained Long-Term Competitive Advantage.
- Diagnostic.
- Change Management (long term secondment with a programme of work informed from the Diagnostic).
- Custom onsite training.
- Convergence Essentials® and Convergence Accelerator® public workshops.
- Individual or group coaching.
- Online training and coaching.
For a quick chat on how we can help you, book an online meeting with Jon