Blog

There is no crisis in the financial market. That we need the financial market is clear anyway. There is no crisis of production companies too, because of course we want the benefit of their products in the future. There is also no crisis in the global economy since the wheel of history can not be turned back.

The financial market is about trust; in hazardeers and unscrupulous profiteers, it is hard to trust. Production companies, particularly the automotive industry, but also in pharmaceuticals, the crisis is about missing and false innovation. The global economic relations crisis is about the missing and the wrong political rules.

“Crisis” means, that there is something to decide, and not that something is running bad. The decision is, whether in our management training and corporations we want to communicate and hand down cultural values, which are quite unrealistic and only have short-term profits in their focus.

The crisis of economic culture can not be coped with probably in a few months. Cultural values must grow again: public policy and corporate social responsibility instead of unbridled profit, sense of justice and human measure instead of exploitation, lateral thinking, courage and creative innovation rather than business autism; international cooperation in the shaping of policy frameworks.

About the author: Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

The article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describes how on time and on budget execution and successful completion of complex projects can be realized. It requires clearly defined leadership process covering all people involved supported by software-based leadership systems.

Basically, the process of managing and driving project execution has three stages

• Leadership Initiation
• Leadership execution management
• Leadership Closing

Fig.: The three stages of the leadership process

1. Leadership Initiation

The execution of every project should be marked by a clearly defined initiation. Setting up the process on an intelligent, elaborate and accurately described base concept can save a considerable amount of time and money.

Initiation provides the project framework and defines the project guidelines, giving the project the actual go-ahead. A successful project start is crucial to the whole course of the project. Initiation particularly includes an exact definition and approval of the project. If the project scope including the individual goals is precisely and consistently defined, initiation is the valuable foundation enabling targeted work all daily leadership activities.

2. Project Leadership – Project Execution Management

The main phase is the actual phase where the project execution is managed. To ensure a highly efficient, proactive, and targeted leadership, it is recommended to base the leadership process on a standardized approach, a repetitive leadership process of measuring, evaluating, defining measures based on software-based project leadership system. Using both, leadership process and leadership system, has proven to significantly add to the chances of project success.

3. Leadership Closing

Every project must end with a closing phase. A deliberately scheduled closing resulting in an approved closing report avoids subsequent interventions. Apart from the closing report, the closing phase includes the acceptance by the client (e.g. customer, management), documented «Lessons Learned» and results that can be reused in next releases of the project or by other projects.

A proper closing phase is an important and highly beneficial activity in the organization’s Lifecycle Management process and discipline.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

The articles Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describe how project leadership systems support project and portfolio managers. The following list summarizes the advantages of the use of a Project Leadership System.

• Modern project leadership systems provide fast and efficient access to all leadership information for the leadership team – from project manager to steering committee.
• All leadership information is merged into one system, making the project leadership system the central source for leadership information for all project team members.
• The project leadership system maximizes the transparency of project leadership across all activities, times and open issues. Particularly, this lays open repeated inefficiencies. Transparency is also important when project leaders change; for Handover it saves time and money.
• Standardized, tool-supported and tool-enforced processes improve the attention of all people involved in and responsible for leadership and simplify the leadership task of driving execution.
• Intelligent interfaces allow relevant leadership data (e.g. master plans from MS Project or Open Workbench) to be imported into the leadership system.
• By using the possibility to connect leadership information and to define causal relationships, significant leadership scenarios or parameters can be traced back to the sources – a perfect instrument for modern risk management and internal control system.
• Formalized, documented and precise sources in the leadership system, make statements more reliable and secure. Project leaders are able to make precise statements referring to possible requests.
• All information is immediately indexed and permanently recorded. Redundancy is avoided.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

To support project and portfolio managers in their daily management of project execution work, Leadership Systems are used more and more frequently. Modern Project Leadership Systems offer predefined project execution processes which support the activities and decisions of the leadership team. In addition, they allow all relevant information (requests, decisions, risks, provisions, changes) to be centrally stored, contextually interrelated and preprocessed to support information needs of different steakholders.

Leadership System – Core Features

The most significant benefit of a Project Leadership System comes from mapping, complementing and supporting the leadership work. This includes all project tasks during the different phases, from efficient initiation, to complete documentation, to closure. Providing a basis for leadership, the Project Leadership System stores all leadership-relevant information including milestones (e.g. imported via an interface from MS Project), or goals and execution management cycles.

In the process of running the execution of a project, coping with an awful lot of decisions, provisions, changes, risk assessments and notes is one of the leadership team´s tasks. The total of this information is not only stored in the Project Leadership System, but also indexed. So causal and restricting relations are recognized and visualized, resulting in reliable statements as to the target and result scores.

From Leadership Meeting Support to Risk Management

The range of features of a Project Leadership System covers all phases from the support of leadership meetings, active change management, progress quantification, conclusive reporting, uninterrupted documentation, traceability of the leading activities, up to a sophisticated risk management.

Proactive risk management is gaining importance. Regulations have come into effect which call on enterprises to improve risk management and establish „internal control systems“. Such legal instructions can be comprehensively met by a Leadership System.

Can Leadership be Quantified?

Where is the project right now? What about target and result scores? Quantification is a significant factor in project leadership work. But can leadership be quantified? Modern Project Leadership Systems prove it! They include features offering business management and portfolio managers a variety of alternatives for assessing and comparing. They allow the definition of project leadership parameters relating to quantifiable criteria such as progress, cost, performance, motivation, and change management. Cross-enterprise benchmarking of project execution management is enabled.

Project Leadership Systems – Summary

A Project Leadership System is not only able to map the complete process of running a project or project plan to a single system, but supports all people involved in leadership with automated processes comprehensively, directly and flexibly. The resulting significant work relief and time saving can easily be verified. In addition to an increase in efficiency and project information value, there is more time to focus on the essential: the proactive, targeted leadership of a project.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

In order to meet time and budget requirements in complex projects and to accomplish projects successfully, clear leadership is required involving all project team members. At this point, software and Internet-based leadership systems are a great support.

It´s no secret to project managers, portfolio managers and people in charge of planning: According to new statistics, about 60 per cent of all projects are not successfully completed. „Not successfully“ in this context does not imply that the project failed altogether. The point is that the project management did not succeed in achieving the goals related to time, cost and quality. What are the reasons? Or to put it the other way round: Which are the factors leading to a successfully completed implementation of a planned project?

Managing a project means leading a project
The factors enabling successful implementation of a planned project are manifold and largely depend on the particular project. But there is one aspect which is crucial to success or failure of ALL projects: targeted and efficient leadership. This being accepted, is makes sense to give some thought to what leadership should be like, and how it should be implemented. Who has which competencies? Which methods are used for leadership? At which intervals do the responsible people meet? How does the management of pending items look like? Or is there maybe an explicit leadership methodology to be followed?

In order to support those in charge of planning, project managers as well as business managers in their daily work, so-called leadership systems are starting to get more commonly used. These systems systematically map leadership and leadership tasks related to a particular project. And, more importantly all leadership information is stored in a Leadership System, contextually interlinked and prepared to support the needs of particular target group.

The leadership system maps the leadership process
Usually, a person responsible for project planning works with a number of supporting software programs such as ERP systems, office applications, collaborative environment and project management solutions. As a result, the leadership information is often widely scattered in different systems making efficient and targeted tracking of data very difficult, for example when it comes to reproducing the reasons for a certain decision or a time delay.

How then can the process of leading, the action of leadership, be mapped and sustainably documented? In contrast to the different programs from which the leader gathers data and facts needed for decisions, the leadership system systematically maps the process of leading the project planning and answers, among others, the following questions: At which point of the project are we? How can we quantify progress and recognize, define and estimate possible risks and bottlenecks? How do we – in accordance with our particular Leadership Methods – usefully and permanently map changes, requests, decisions, events, risks or measures, all in the same place? As it is the leadership meetings that best reflect how leadership is implemented, leadership systems usually offer a variety of automated functions related to the planning, calling, conducting and documentation of meetings.

In the follow-up article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution (Part 2) I will focus on leadership meetings, proactive risk management and the question if there is a way of quantifying leadership.

About the author:
Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

We rely in the majority of decisions and actions on the cultural patterns of organizations, in which we live. Most of these patterns and values with which we steer ourselves are unconscious. Only rarely we object to them. Some individual patterns are actively learned by training or by serious “injuries”. Think about how you drive a car: You coordinate hand, foot and eye, adhere to the rules and respect the rights of other road users. Brain researchers describe this with the training of our synapses. “What has proved working and repeatedly gone through or what is equipped with high energy, engraves our actions and behavior.”

You have a wealth of experience that these organizational and individual process of coining patterns does not always run smoothly, specifically in companies and organizations. Not only that nowadays some patterns became dysfunctional, which most probably in the past were perfectly appropriate. Some organizational patterns, in particular how we act in power struggles or protect us from these like “devalue”, “dominate”, “intrigue”, “to put on ice,” “denounce”, “refuse to support”, “subject”, “threaten,” “spread  rumours” are quite indecent, even if they are individually applied not fully aware nor intended. To use words of Hannah Arendt, they are part of the “banality of evil”, as you find it even today in times of democracy and market economy (occasionally).

You rightly take this for a “moral argument”. Even if there is nobody personally to blame for: “Do not judge!” –  If leadership by example and effects of actions in organizations supplies and shapes the cultural patterns, an imperative can be formulated: “In everything you do or initiate as a manager, think about which cultural patterns you want to shape or make available for your organization through it.” This usually also pays off economically, as long as we depend in our value creation on cooperation, responsibility and creativity. And even if not …

About the author:
Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant and author of the monthly publication “Change Management Short Cut“.

🇩🇪 Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen