Getting The Biggest Bang For The Buck

So I had the opportunity to sit in on a colleague teaching a class in Performance Improvement. 

One tool that I really liked from the class was the Impact-Effort Matrix. 

To determine project worth doing, the matrix has the:

Impacts (Vertical) – Improved customer satisfaction, quality, delivery time, etc.

Effort (Horizontal) – Money, Time, etc. 

The best bang for the buck are the projects in upper left (“Quick Wins”) that have a high impact or return for not a lot of effort. 

In contract, the projects that are the least desirable are in the lower right (“Thankless Tasks”) that have a low impact or return but come at a high cost or lot of effort. 

This is simple to do and understand and yet really helps to prioritize projects and find the best choices among them. 😉

(Source Graphic: Andy Blumenthal)

What Are The Chances for IT Project Success?

So I was teaching a class in Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance this week. 

In one of the class exercises, one of the students presented something like this bell-shaped distribution curve in explaining a business case for an IT Project. 

The student took a nice business approach and utilized a bell-shaped curve distribution to explain to his executives the pros and cons of a project. 

Basically, depending on the projects success, the middle (1-2 standard deviations, between 68-95% chance), the project will yield a moderate level of efficiencies and cost-savings or not. 

Beyond that:

– To the left are the downside risks for significant losses–project failure, creating dysfunction, increased costs, and operational risks to the mission/business. 

– To the right is the upside potential for big gains–innovations, major process reengineering, automation gains, and competitive advantages. 

This curve is probably a fairly accurate representation based on the high IT project failure rate in most organizations (whether they want to admit it or not). 

I believe that with:

– More user-centric enterprise architecture planning on the front-end

– Better IT governance throughout

– Agile development and scrum management in execution 

that we can achieve ever higher project success rates along the big upside potential that comes with it!  

We still have a way to go to improve, but the bell-curve helps explains what organizations are most of the time getting from their investments. 😉

(Source Graphic: Adapted by Andy Blumenthal from here)

DMAIC Reengineering

A colleague gave a wonderful talk the other day on process engineering.

The key steps to reduce waste (Lean) or variation/defects (Six Sigma) are as follows:

Define – Scope the project.

Measure – Benchmark current processes.

Analyze – Develop to-be processes (with a prioritized list of improvements) and plan for implementation.

Improve – Executive process improvements.

Control – Monitor/refine new processes.

It was amazing to me how similar to enterprise architecture this is in terms of: defining your “current” and “future” states and creating a transition plan and executing it.

Also, really liked the Project Scoping questions:

– What problem do you want to solve/what process do you want to improve?

– Why do you need this?

– What is the benefit?  And to whom?

– What are your objectives for this effort?

– Who are the key stakeholders?

– When is this needed and why?

I think process improvement/engineering methodologies like this can be a huge benefit to our organizations, especially where the tagline is “Why should we change–we’ve always done it this way!” 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)