1. Are you involved in a merger or acquisition?

So what will you do differently? M&A is back in vogue with deal activity at its highest since the boom times 5 years ago. Trouble is, pulling off the deal is the easy part – creating a successful “newco” is incredibly difficult (as the endless statistics show).

So we all know culture is critical…….common objectives are essential……..shared understanding is simply………unobtainable!!!

When you are managing the most complex change your organisation will ever undergo, how do you create a common view of progress, ensure the right people see the right information, get decisions made on time not out of hours?

Enterprise Project Management may sound like a subject best left to wet November days and “techie” types, but when the success of your business depends on getting everyone to the same page of the book, who cares what the book is called?

Enterprise Project Management (EPM) – shared understanding in a complex world.

2. Launching a new product this year?

There was a time when competitive advantage was easy – if you had the best product and the patents hadn’t run out, you could milk the proverbial “cash cow” for a long time.

Unfortunately times have changed. No matter how good your product or service is, someone, somewhere in the world can make a version that is quicker / cheaper / lighter / better – and it is taking them less time to bring it to market each time.

If you are in the business of manufacturing or retailing then you know speed is king, speed to design, speed to test, speed to launch – so you are going to have to work a lot harder, right?

But what if you could work a lot smarter too?
What if you could coordinate the activities needed to bring that product to market far better?
What if you could bring your suppliers and customers on board and make them part of the product launch?
What if you could “plan” across all your “enterprise” (think every stakeholder, not just your team) and actively manage dependencies between the various teams' work?

Enterprise Project Management (EPM ) – bringing your world together – customers, suppliers, internal teams; because when it comes to creating competitive advantage, working harder isn’t enough!

3. Are you spending more than £500k on IT projects this year?

Great, so your estimated overrun on cost will be over £75k right? (we like to be optimistic here; depending on who you read IT projects are more likely to overrun by more than 50%!)

Now think about it, £75k – that’s one hell of a party, a nice new Porsche Cayman on the driveway or the difference between your keeping your job or not!

The last one is probably a more realistic – and sobering – thought. Yet given that the risk of overrun is so high (in probability and costs) what are you going to do about governance? You may talk a lot about Prince 2, risk registers or resource management but the reality is you will resort to personal heroics – working crazy hours trying to make things happen and keep your head above water.

The problem with heroes is too often they become martyrs!

There must be a better way, right?  Well, the cure for martyrdom hasn’t quite arrived yet but a simple, easy-to-use way of establishing solid process, visibility of risks & issues and the opportunity to really see what resources are needed - that is available now!

Enterprise Project Management (EPM ) – you can still be a hero, but with some simple, effective, easy-to-deploy tools, you can avoid becoming a martyr.