I’m a firm believer in transformation through delivery. In my experience real change cannot be implemented without a vehicle that is used to drive it through the organisation and crash through existing barriers. Transformation is far more than just deploying new technologies for the sake of it. A genuine competitive…

A significant part of my engagements involves post-mortems on large, failed technology projects. And out of professional interest, I study public project failures and write case studies about them. Based on my experience and studies, most of these disasters could have been prevented (or at least anticipated) based on the…

I have a very simple metric for determining the health of a project or an organization: the age of issues. Issues are like fish; when they get old, they stink. A sure sign of a lack of leadership and upcoming trouble is old issues or issues that take longer than…

I have done quite a number of inflight reviews and post-mortems of troubled and failed large system implementation projects. One pattern that emerges very clearly is the one of missing milestones whilst keeping the go-live date the same. It rarely ends well. I see it again and again. Important milestones…

We all have heard about the disruptions that are impacting our society and the business world: robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, shared economy, blockchain, big data, augmented reality, and so on. But, there is one disruption affecting our world that media and academia seem to have completely missed. The Project Economy For decades…

We’ve all witnessed projects in trouble-the ones that required a quick and firm intervention in need of help from a task force to bring it back on track. No executive wants to be in such a difficult situation, especially not with one of his or her own projects. But how…

A new year has just started, but also in 2021 companies will be talking about digital transformation often. I think digital transformation is a terrible description for what is just another transformation. See my article “ Digital Strategy Does Not Exist “ on why that is. But we shall use…

I have had many heated discussions around these terms. People mix these up and it confuses your organization and its people. This is my take on it. If an organization is running many projects at the same time it is impossible to make the right decisions if all projects are…

For many years, organizations, researchers, and practitioners have analyzed how to manage technology projects successfully. Among them is the Standish Group, which regularly publishes its findings in its Chaos reports. In 1994, Standish reported a shocking project success rate of only 16 percent; another 53 percent of the projects were…