Tag Archives: management

Do & Review, Position Descriptions

How to think about and organize Project, Client, and Offering Managers.

Clients and Offerings
Figure 1: A business with project that deliver offerings to clients.
Projects
Figure 2: Project managers deliver offering value on time, on target, and on budget.

Organizations that offer solutions to clients manage: Projects, Clients, and Offerings as suggested in Figure 1. Managing each requires different skills and seeks to achieve different goals as outlined below.

Project Managers, see Figure 2, deliver offering value to specific clients on time, on budget, and on target. Project Managers are also counted on to extend and expand engagements in order to deliver even greater value over a longer time frame. Continue reading How to think about and organize Project, Client, and Offering Managers. →

Get Aligned, People Matters

How to test for and secure top team alignment on key matters to improve growth and performance.

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Get AlignedLeadership teams need to Get Clear about many things, including:

Leaders often struggle to reach a good, a better, or even a best solution to countless such questions. More important than the right answer, though, is all team members having the same answer.

Once all team members are aligned on one answer, even a not very good one, on any matter, odds are that performance will improve because everyone pulls in the same direction. The result is a multiplier effect suggested by the three arrows forming a much larger fourth arrow in the above graphic . Continue reading How to test for and secure top team alignment on key matters to improve growth and performance. →

Manage to Lead

Announcing: Manage to Lead — Seven Truths to Help You Change the World

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Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.

Peter DiGiammarino will present a one-hour summary of his Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World framework, that can be used to describe and assess any organization, at the Northern Virginia Society for Human Resource Managers dinner meeting on April 30.

He will also provide a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance. Continue reading Announcing: Manage to Lead — Seven Truths to Help You Change the World →

Plan Change

How to use the Change Framework to turn initiatives into action.

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If the leader thinks s/he knows what needs to change and that everyone is aligned, ask: “How do you know your team knows what you want to do; why don’t we ask them just to verify? If they all say what you expect them to say, a positive step towards getting what you want done will have been taken just by bringing it to the center of their attention. If it turns out that some or all of the team are not as aligned as expected, then remedial steps can be taken.”

Survey the leader’s top team and ask them each:

  • To describe the current state, that is: how things are today.
  • What really good things happen if we change and what really bad things happen if we do not?
  • To describe how things would be in the future if their ideal changes were successfully implemented.
  • What needs to be done in order to get from where things are today to where things would ideally be next?
  • What will make it hard to do what needs to be done in order to get from today to the targeted next state?

Review results with the leader to bring him/her up to speed on the group’s data. Look for and discuss fully any points the leader finds confusing or surprising. Continue reading How to use the Change Framework to turn initiatives into action. →

Do & Review, Finance Matters, Manage to Lead

Four questions an organization needs to ask every performance period in order to perform, learn, and grow to its full potential.

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It is impossible to control what you cannot, and what you do not, measure. For every important thing that the organization does, decide what is most important to monitor and then watch carefully to know how things are going.

If what to monitor is not known then:

  • Watch everything and whittle away what turns out to not be useful and keep watching what turns out to be useful.
  • Study similar organizations to learn what they track.
  • Look up industry analysts and market researchers to find out what they watch.

Continue reading Four questions an organization needs to ask every performance period in order to perform, learn, and grow to its full potential. →