Identifying areas of pain

Abstract

One of the most common issues facing companies today is that they concentrate their management efforts on executing individual projects, but fail to understand the impact of these on the wider business. The result is sub-optimal performance and lower returns for the business as a whole. The typical challenges facing business today when managing projects include:

• Misalignment between projects and their business objectives: The purpose of a project is to advance one or more business objectives. Most projects start out closely aligned with these objectives, but gaps inevitably appear. Projects drift and business objectives change and evolve. Without redirection, projects and deliverables end up failing to meet expectations.

• Late or delayed projects: Late projects wreak havoc, delaying the time at which a company can start reaping business benefits, thwarting precise payback period calculations and disrupting the long term return on investment.

• Dependency conflicts: Most projects are interrelated, sharing people, equipment, resources and deliverables. These dependencies mean that a single project delay has a significant ripple effect on related projects, disrupting schedules, causing resource conflicts and even triggering expensive contingencies, in order to minimise risks.