Imagine an ad that reads as follows: Help reduce productivity Use resources less effectively Increase costs Not many people would rush to buy this "solution". However, this is exactly the solution chosen by a large number of projects and companies on a daily basis, putting billions of shareholders' capital in jeopardy. Instead of establishing fundamental … Continue reading Not Making A Decision Is Also A Decision →

Iris Bohnet is the Director of Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and cochairs its Behavioral Insights Group. She was recently interviewed by Harvard Business Review, where she made the point shown above in connection with diversity training. She contends that rather than running more workshops or try to eradicate the … Continue reading First Change Your Processes, not Your People →

DJ Patil, U.S. Chief Data Scientist, defines a data-driven government as a “connected organization that responsibly gathers, processes, leverages, and releases data in a timely fashion to enable transparency, create efficiencies, ensure security, and foster innovation to benefit the nation.” Since data is at the core of every project controls organization, can we apply elements … Continue reading Is Your Project Controls Organization Data-Driven? →

Most colleagues in the project management profession are familiar with what is often referred to as the Cost Influence Curve. Put briefly it documents the decreasing level of control to influence project costs as the project evolves in time. The best description of this concept was written by the late Stanford professor Boyd C. Paulson, … Continue reading Influence Curve — or Inverted Complacency Curve? →