Stanford Professors, Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, teach in our Stanford Advanced Project Management Program, and are completing research and a book on scaling-up excellence. In a recent post, Bob pointed to Ben Horowitz's thoughts on "Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company". Working with leaders of complex project-based work or PBW (programs and projects) in a variety of global companies, I have seen the challenges of scaling from a small, co-located program team to a globally-distributed team with hundreds of employees and myriad vendors and contractors. Horowitz suggests three scaling techniques:
Horowitz's post is worth a serious read for application to designing and leading PBW.
- Specialization: you can not do everything and know everything as you grow
- Organizational design: communications architecture for your PBW but recognize there is no perfect one
- Process: purpose of process is communication
- Determine what needs to be communicated (Who needs to know what, why, and what is the smoothest way to provide it? We are talking not just technical but also management information; engineers with minimal leadership experience often overlook the importance of non-technical information.)
- Identify decisions that have to be made (Start that decision log, however small and own it. Be crystal clear about how your PBW leadership team needs to make decisions. De facto approaches cause problems...fast. Decide by design not default.)
- Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths (Especially critical for globally-distributed teams in multiple cultures and time zones. Focus on what makes it easiest to get the program's work actually done.)
- Decide who runs which groups (no multiple owners of work--one, single person is responsible for each group)
- Identify communication paths that you did not optimize and mitigate (You cannot give all paths the same weight; recognize which ones that have less attention and plan for addressing those issues that may surface.)
Horowitz's post is worth a serious read for application to designing and leading PBW.
Superb! I'm a PM and like to add. Managers can plan their strategy based on four steps of risk management which prevails in an organization. Following are the steps to manage risks effectively in an organization.
ReplyDeleteRisk Identification
Risk Quantification
Risk Response
Risk Monitoring and Control
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The right project template is the one that offers you benefits inside the initial stage to start a fresh project in making project checklist and analysis. These are some of the important points that I believe that a project manager should consider. However, if you are looking for a perfect Project Management Templates, then you need to have some excellent resource. For this I do recommend to have some research on internet. Thanks!!
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