By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions

​As a business leader, you may have experienced the failure of at least one project. In those instances, many executives have considered what techniques would help ensure future project success.
​
One way to view these failures is to hone in on what didn’t work in those situations. Flipping the switch on these scenarios can provide valuable insight into what could’ve worked.

Along those lines, what common mistakes can project managers avoid to help ensure success?

1. Failing to Think Outside the Box to Avoid Potential Problems

Unfortunately, many Project Management (PMs) often focus on putting out fires instead of thinking outside the box to help prevent the occurrence of possible challenges. Great PMs tune into what could go wrong. They are forward-looking, ask questions, and are on the lookout for problems before they ever occur.

2. Prioritizing the Unimportant over the Important

Too often, PMs will focus on minutia instead of the most essential things: ensuring the client is happy, tracking the budget, and keeping the project on time (to name a few).

For instance, it doesn’t matter nearly as much if someone hasn’t updated a chart or properly marked a task as 40% instead of 50% complete. A good PM constantly weighs what’s essential and tackles those items first.

3. Under-utilizing the Best Aspects of the Team

When PMs don't take the time to understand their individual team members' strengths and weaknesses, the team cannot function at optimum levels.

For example, Bob may excel at performing a particular task, but instead, the PM assigns the task to Suzy, who isn’t as skilled at that specific job. Also, some team members may require more oversight than others. Finding these abilities and assigning team members to perform tasks that match those skills can tremendously boost team productivity.

4. Neglecting to Regularly Test Early-On Assumptions

PMs often have to make assumptions based on scarce available information at the beginning of projects. Testing and revising assumptions against this information is essential when more data becomes available. Failure to do so can result in serious errors affecting project success.

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Speaking of avoiding failure, Scrum is a fantastic project management approach that helps identify problems before they become issues.

As a certified Professional Scrum Master, I’ve experienced this reality repeatedly in my line of work. I’ve also seen how using Scrum typically decreases the time to finish projects, and it doesn’t matter what type of project it is.

I'd love to talk with you if you have any projects you would like to undertake but have limited internal resources to complete them! You can click the button below to schedule a chat.

As a business leader, it can be daunting to plan for and implement a digital transformation initiative. How do you ensure that you start off on the right foot?

There is one essential thing to consider…ensuring your team has the right mindset. It’s a vital aspect for ensuring project success and keeping your ideology fit.

It’s great to have a good plan, great people, processes, and execution, but if you don’t have the right mindset, successful digital transformation projects will only be a pipe dream.  

So, what are the qualities of a great mindset? It all starts with team members who:

• Understand their own strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the project
• Are grounded in reality, goal oriented and are great team players
• View change positively, viewing challenges as opportunities to overcome

These qualities are just the tip of the iceberg, so let’s take a deeper dive into some four key aspects of having a great mindset:

1. Honesty and Candor

Creating a mindset of honesty and candor is essential to have successful teams. Honesty should never be devalued within your team.

Candor involves talking about things in a real way, without negativity, towards other team members. It’s discussing the things that can be done better or how individuals can interact more effectively, without pointing fingers.

This also includes Care, which means having an attitude that you are all in this together. It’s involves determining how to best look after team members and being aware of how individual members are doing.

Care comes down to active concern for the total person. Case in point—everybody's got a life outside of work. Having an empathetic understanding of what things employees are balancing, to the point that they feel free to share about them, is the goal.

Here’s an example. Bob has been working late every night and seems stressed, which is uncommon for him. As a leader, it would be helpful to ask Bob how he's really doing—to show true care to him, making sure he is doing alright. It may also involve “taking one for the team”—giving Bob permission to leave a couple hours earlier the next day, if that seems appropriate.

And here’s a further illustration of how having the right collective mindset throughout your team might look like. Bob’s manager could ask someone to pick up the slack for him and a team member would most likely be glad to jump in and help.

On the other hand, having negative team mindsets could result in many more problems on a project. Imagine this—team members with a fearful mindset aren’t going to be as forthcoming when something's a mess. And with that type of environment, you’re most likely not going to find individuals wanting to jump into to help when someone’s needs a break. They’ll perhaps be more concerned about not meeting their own work goals while caring less about the overall team goals.

Bottom line—it comes down to working with your team to build the right mindset, which in turn, helps create a healthier team culture.

2. Endurance

Endurance is one of the most important factors of continued success and is a large part of having a great mindset. This is true for anything, whether you are building a business, a team or your life.

Successful teams complete projects over and over again. It has to do with their ability to endure. Every day they come to work and complete tasks, completing one more piece of the puzzle at a time. It involves team members keeping their mindsets positive and making a decision to endure.

Of course, great leaders will use the “Care” approach to check on them, as well, to help them in the process if they’re getting stuck.

In the end, endurance is the ability do what it takes over and over again with measurable, incremental and positive results, which move you towards a successful conclusion of a project. It’s also about making sure you do what you said you would do.

3. Visibility and Transparency

This involves open communication with your stakeholders, whether external or internal. Essentially, it’s all about letting them know that you will have a mindset of honesty, candor and care with them and that you will escalate issues when required. By doing that, you show leadership how much you care about the project, which will pay dividends for you throughout the course of your work.

For example, if you happen to miss a deadline, it may look less erratic when you're raising the issue with management. It really is going to make a difference in the way that they view you and how they view the project.

But that’s not the only good outcome. Having visibility and transparency amongst all team members can positively affect the end users of the process, and eventually the business as a whole.   

4. Change Management

How you approach communication of planned changes has a powerful effect on mindset. That’s why a good change management approach is important—employees in an organization really need to understand what's changing. That way, they can prepare themselves for the changes, so that they can achieve the right mindset. This involves communicating the amount of effort required for a project to transition from where they’re at to where they have to be for the business to succeed. Then, it’s asking for their feedback along the way.

This removes the outward perception of changing for change sake and casts a vision of the future to help ensure success for the organization. And it really becomes an organizational change/movement mindset.

This is vital, because this can change the whole organization’s attitude and help create an environment that is more accepting of digital transformation.

When you can do that, you’re well on your way to a  more successful digital transformation journey for your organization!

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This newsletter is an example of the content Michael Cantu and I have included in our best-selling book on Amazon, No-Nonsense Digital Transformation. This book talks extensively about creating proper mindsets, building exceptional teams, and creating great cultures, so it isn't just for digital transformation fans.

Are you interested in learning more? Then click the button below to get started!  ​

As a business leader, ensuring newly launched projects succeed is always challenging. Unfortunately, projects can still fail despite best efforts.

One different way to view these failures is to hone in on what didn’t work in those situations. Flipping the switch on these scenarios can provide valuable insight into what could’ve worked.

Along those lines, what are some common mistakes that project managers can avoid to help ensure success?

1. Failing to Think Outside the Box to Avoid Potential Problems

Unfortunately, many Project Management (PMs) are so focused on putting out fires instead of thinking outside the box to help prevent the occurrence of possible challenges. Great PMs are tuned into what could potentially go wrong. They are forward-looking, ask questions, and are on the lookout for problems before they ever occur.

2. Prioritizing the Unimportant over the Important

Too often, PMs will focus on minutia instead of the most important things: ensuring the client is happy, tracking to budget, and keeping the project on time, to name a few.

For instance, it doesn’t matter nearly as much if someone hasn’t updated a chart or properly marked a task as 40% instead of 50% complete. A good PM constantly weighs what’s most important and tackles those items first.

3. Under-utilizing the Best Aspects of the Team

When PMs don’t take the time to understand their individual team members’ strengths and weaknesses, this can sabotage the team functioning at more optimum levels.

For example, Bob may excel at performing a particular task, but instead, the PM assigns the task to Suzy who isn’t as skilled at that particular job. Also, some team members may require more oversight than others. Finding out these abilities and assigning team members to perform tasks that match those skills can tremendously boost team productivity.

4. Neglecting to Regularly Test Early-On Assumptions

At the beginning of projects, PMs often have to make assumptions based on a scarcity of available information. When more data becomes available, it’s important to test and revise assumptions against this information. Failure to do so can result in serious errors that can affect project success.


These are a few examples of steps PMs can take to avoid issues that can lead to project failure.

Speaking of avoiding failure, Scrum is a wonderful project management approach that helps identify problems before they ever become issues.

As a certified Professional Scrum Master, I’ve experienced this reality repeatedly in my line of work. I’ve also seen how the use of Scrum typically decreases the amount of time to finish projects, and it doesn’t matter what type of project it is.

If you have any projects that you would like to undertake but have limited internal resources to complete them, or you are stuck in the middle of a project with little hope of moving forward, I’d love to have a conversation with you!

If that sounds good, click the button below to schedule a chat.

By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions

I've been talking to a prospective client over the last couple days about the benefits of Scrum and how it would be a great tool to use for their CRM implementation.

Not sure what Scrum is? In short, it's a project management framework is used for developing products.

Anyway, it got me to thinking--it's been awhile since I've talked about the value of Scrum. So, I thought I would share with you an experience I had with a client to illustrate how this Agile tool revolutionized this manufacturer's business.

Prior to my engagement with my client, they had a very cumbersome, rigid product development process. This became evident when it took them two-to-three years to develop their last new product. Considering the complexity of the product involved, it took them waaay too long! They were like a truck stuck in the mud!

The CEO knew there was a better way. That’s why he hired me! And because I'm a certified Professional Scrum Master, this project was right up my alley.

The first thing I did was to carry over lessons learned from their previous development effort into the new process. I did this to prevent those issues from happening again.

Next, I trained them on Scrum and we developed the new process together.

In just two months, the process development piece was complete and I left the project in their very capable hands.

And the results were great! Eight months later, they launched not only their originally planned product, but five other component systems that fit across their whole product line. If you take the additional products they developed into account, they experienced a product speed-to-market increase of over 100%!

They are so thrilled with Scrum, they are implementing it company-wide, including non-product related functions, like Marketing. And the results have been great so far!

So, if you want to prevent your project from getting stuck in in the mud and want to kick it into high gear, Scrum could be your answer.

And if you're interested in learning more about Scrum or how to transform you business, I'd love to have a chat! Just click the button below to schedule a time

Gordon Tredgold is our guest blogger this week. He is a Global Gurus Top 10 Leadership Expert and Speaker. To learn more about Gordon, click this link to visit his website.

There is no such thing as failure, only feedback, and it's what we do with  that feedback that determines how successful we will ultimately be.
 
When we fail, we have three options:

• We can choose to quit, which is the only true failure
• We can choose to ignore it, but when we do that, we are flirting with madness because, according to Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results, or
• We can look at the feedback from our failures, adapt our approach, and try again.

 
Early in my career, I had many failures, the worst being a $50k project I was involved in that we delivered for just over $5m.
 
To say that the customer was unhappy would be an understatement.
 
I was mortified, and I became very passionate about avoiding failures. I start looking at them more closely to see if there were any patterns as to what was causing us to fail, which we could then look to mitigate and hopefully use to prevent future failure.
 
The more I investigated, the more obvious it became that all of our failures occurred for the same four reasons.  
 
These were: we had the wrong focus, a lack of accountability, we'd made things overly complex, or we lacked transparency into what was needed and into our actual performance. 
 
Interestingly as I started to study other failures, I found that these same root causes were also present. Using this feedback, I began to work on improving performance in all four of these areas.
 
Sharpening the Focus: to make sure we had clarity over our goals and what success looked like. When we have the wrong focus, it doesn't matter how hard or how long we will work; we will become frustrated and demotivated by our lack of progress.
 
Boosting Accountability: by clarifying roles, responsibilities, and expectations of that role. This helped to get people to take ownership and better understand what was needed from them.
 
Promoting Simplicity: looking to ensure we didn't follow our natural tendency to over-complicate things, keeping communication clear and straightforward to improve understanding. Without understanding, it leads to confusion and misunderstanding, which will then cause us to fail.
 
Lastly, increasing Transparency: making sure that by doing enough due diligence to ensure we knew what was fully involved in being successful, and having the proper tracking in place to monitor progress.  
 
Projects are like icebergs; it's easy to see the third about the water, but the thirds below sink the ship. And suppose we lack transparency in our performance. In that case, we can fall into the happy under-achiever trap, where we think we are doing well and but in reality, we are falling short. By the time we realize this, it's too late; we become destined to be unhappy underachievers.
 
By taking this approach of improving Focus, Accountability, Simplicity, and Transparency, we have not only helped avoid failures; we have helped achieve significantly better results.
 
Focus and Accountability help improve effectiveness by ensuring we have the right people doing the right job, and Simplicity and Transparency help increase efficiency by making things easier and providing feedback on performance so we can see the impact of any changes we make. If you can improve both effectiveness and efficiency, you put yourself well and truly on the path to success.
 
Using this approach has helped me turn around failing projects, underperforming departments and deliver significant business benefits, such as $50m per annum in cost savings and operational performance improvements, increasing on-time delivery from 35 percent to 95 percent.
 
But none of this would have been possible if I hadn't had that big multi-million dollar failure that fired up my passion not to fail again.
 
There is no such thing as failure, only feedback, so how will you use this feedback to benefit you and your company?

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