Jim Donovan has some good advice on how the project team should be drawn from the best people in the organisation, and on how to lead and generate effective business change generally. His advice is given as '10 rules' (emphasis mine):

1. The project team should be drawn from the best people in the organisation, the ones who will drive the new way, and will likely hold leadership roles in it. Don’t staff projects with your third-rate cast-offs. Don’t rely on contractors for roles that should be held by business experts.
2. The naval officer on site in the dockyard overseeing the construction of a new ship is ideally the officer who will be its first captain. The best person to lead a change project is the person who will run the new process afterwards. Failing that, get someone even more qualified and powerful, not less, to be your change agent. Sitting on a governance committee is not enough.
3. The change leader and the change team must have been indoctrinated into the new way of thinking, and be passionate, effective advocates as well as good at their jobs.
4. Don’t treat change as an IT project, even if largely based around new IT systems. It’s a business project. The best businesses train their business managers in smart project management, process design and change management. These are not IT skills, they are business skills. Having said that, good business-savvy IT people can make great business change people if you also follow rules 1, 2 and 3.
5. Be ambitious but realistic about what you can achieve with the money, time, resources and ownership support you have available to you. Despite knowing this, I too have sometimes fooled myself or been pressured into going ahead on over-ambitious projects without adequate resources, with predictable results. Heroism, hope and luck are not reliable ingredients for success.
6. Give the change leader the power to decide, as far as possible, and have fast access to higher decision-makers when necessary. There is no value-add and much cost from constantly briefing and waiting on uninvolved decision-makers.
7. Like any major change proposal, nothing will happen unless you dedicate resources (people, time, money) to make the change happen. Expecting people to design and implement a major change while doing their day jobs rarely works, especially when their core process is broken. Put your best operational people onto the change project; here’s where you can usefully deploy contractors - to fill in for them in the operational teams.
8. Avoid highly structured project management methodologies. I recommend a much more agile, lo-tech approach. Don’t try to specify everything before you start. Have a high level “architectural” concept to guide you, but get going!
9. Keep the alligators at bay, but focus on the swamp draining. Don’t worry about dealing with the current stream of problems - that’s the job of the operational teams. Put in place some holding plan, but concentrate your best resources on creating the new model that will work. Get it working, put all new customers, and new transactions onto it, transfer all customers without problems onto it, and then, last, not first, deal with the problem backlog.
10. Notwithstanding rule 9, try to deliver value quickly, in chunks, rather than going for the big bang. Incremental success builds support.
11. Bonus rule: communicate, communicate, communicate; up, down, across, inward, outward.

This is great advice Jim, which lines up with my experience as a project manager bringing about business change, often enabled by IT.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion.

My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdowns for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one at a later time.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate (among other things) my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To assure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, you will need to contact each of my children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any decisions that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house and get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpeting. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the potential homebuyers in my area that they like the features this house has.

I advise you to run up and look at the house my neighbor build last year, as we like it a great deal. It has many things that we feel we also need in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the construction cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your ideas and completed plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Kindest Regards.

received by email, author unknown

I've been thinking a lot about Risk lately.

Increasingly I'm finding the word Risk is more emotive than helpful. This is the case particularly in my professional life, but I'm also finding it holds true in other spheres too.

I'm seeing more and more people, when they hear the word Risk, hear something akin to potential disaster. Events like the recent loss of seven lives in the outdoors simply contribute to this, and it spills into other areas of life too.

Whereas, Risk is simply uncertainty. And Risk Mitigation is simply planning the actions you will take to reduce that uncertainty to an acceptable level.

I'm finding that people understand it quicker if, in Risk discussions, we talk more about moving from uncertainty to certainty.

Professionally I am currently involved in preparing for four projects - but we simply don't know enough yet to be certain as to the most appropriate approach, how long that might take, and the resources required. In other words there is uncertainty - or risk. None of these projects is potentially going to experience a disaster, but there is uncertainty.

In some cases organisations try to reduce uncertainty by issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) detailing their requirements. However, my experience is that while RFPs can (sometimes!) be good at articulating functional requirements they are rarely, if ever, good at exposing the true current state, particularly in terms of stakeholder readiness. Accordingly, there is always significant uncertainty as to the appropriate project approach and resourcing required to increase stakeholder readiness to the level required to enable the functional change anticipated.

In the case of the projects I am currently preparing for we are not being subjected to an RFP process. But there is still uncertainty - so we are having to formulate approaches to reduce that uncertainty to a level acceptable to us and our clients.

A typical approach, which we are using in the current cases, is to use an initial scoping and planning phase to increase knowledge of the factors which are currently uncertain - thus reducing uncertainty (risk) to an acceptable level.

The key output of the scoping and planning phase will be the project management plan (project charter) outlining:

• Scope and Solution
• Activities, Estimates, Milestones and Deliverables
• Resources, Project Organisation Structure and Responsibilities
• Stakeholders and Communication Activity
• Organisational Alignment Activity
• Process Alignment Activity
• Risk Management Plan
• Assumptions, Constraints and Dependencies
• Project Processes for Status Reporting, Change Control, Issues and Acceptance

What is your understanding of Risk?