Monthly Archives: November 2015

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Who’s Running Your Business?

Most of our businesses are run by systems that we have put into place to ensure consistent delivery of products and services. Sometimes these systems are automated and sometimes the systems are manual. However, in every case, these systems are set up, maintained and operated by our people. So, our businesses are run by systems but our people run the systems.

A few years ago I was attending a monthly meeting of The Executive Committee in Calgary and we were discussing some typical business issues that members of the group were facing. We were extremely focused on fixing the business system side of things and one of the group made this statement and it struck everyone as profound.

“our businesses are run by systems but our people run the systems“

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Is Your Main Thing Really Your Main Thing?

“The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.”  Stephen Covey

 

What is your “main thing”? What is it that you do so well that people are willing to pay you for it? If you are not doing your main thing, or what you do best every day, chances are you are frustrated and even disengaged at work. According to Gallup annual poll, only 31.5% of US employees were engaged at work in 2014. That means that 68.5% of the US is not engaged in their work! As business leaders, this should scare us!

My main thing is leadership. Specifically: strategy, process and structure, and communication. Today, I do that from a business point of view by setting business strategy and vision, building processes and structure to implement that strategy and then communicating to the organization through this process. Prior to business leadership, I did the same thing from a project management perspective and, earlier, from an engineering and construction perspective.

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How To Become A Company Of Giants

“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” ~ David Ogilvey

People are the foundation of our business. We need to ensure that we are building a rock solid business foundation and a huge part of this effort is to ensure that we are hiring the very best people we can. We want to hire giants, the best people we can find, so that we can become a company of giants and stand out from the crowd!

A number of years ago when we were hiring to fill quite a few engineer and project manager requirements, the leaders of the organization did the interviewing and candidate selection (the actual hiring was handled by HR). These leaders included the project managers and some of the top engineers. Using this method we were finding and hiring quality people.  Soon, however, the time required to recruit and hire new staff overtook the availability of these leaders, managers and engineers. Consequently, we ramped up a recruitment team whose job was to recruit and hire the staff that was required. The recruitment team consisted of human resource people.

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23 Questions To Improve Project Delivery

Project management is not for the faint of heart. Projects can be very complex and stressful especially as the project size grows.  Besides managing scope, schedule and budget, project managers need to manage relationships with staff, customers, contractors, vendors, community leaders, and many others. Much of this management is now done virtually as the project team, contractors and customers can be spread in multiple locations over multiple time zones, cultures and languages. This can be a daunting task!

Even more daunting is the task of a person responsible for the oversight of multiple projects. How can one person possibly stay on top of all the details from multiple large projects? The answer is that they cannot. So, what can a person responsible for oversight of multiple large projects do to ensure the projects are on track and delivered successfully?