Tag Archives: Construction Industry Institute

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Your Business is Throwing Money Away By Repeating Mistakes

One of the most frustrating things a leader can experience is to learn that a painful or costly mistake that happened in the past, continues to be repeated within the business. The pain of the mistake and the effort required to fix it should be enough incentive to ensure that the same mistake is not made again. However, that is rarely the case!

This was a big challenge I faced in leading a global business. How can lessons learned in one world area be shared efficiently and effectively with the other world areas? I can’t count the number of times I sat in a review in one world area to find out they just made a mistake that another area made 1, 5 or even 10 years prior. This is so frustrating for everyone involved and it costs the organization a lot of money!

Why are Mistakes Repeated?

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46 Key Indicators For Successful Portfolio Management

A portfolio can be defined as a group of related or unrelated businesses, projects or programs managed by a single management executive. Based on this definition, are you or your business managing portfolios of projects or businesses?

What key indicators are you using to manage them? An extensive study on portfolio management was completed and published in July 2014 by research team RT303 of the Construction Industry Institute. In this study, the research team identified 46 separate indicators that should be regularly monitored by a portfolio manager.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the 23 Questions To Improve Project Delivery. In this post I listed 23 questions that a portfolio manager can ask project managers to better understand the health of the projects in their portfolio. The post today takes a higher level approach and identifies the key indicators that a portfolio manager should be monitoring every month. These key indicators can also be used to generate your custom set of questions as you take a deep dive into your portfolios and projects each month.

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How Do Leaders Get Their Organizations From Vision to Action?

“Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, Encourage the Heart”  Kouzes and Posner

 

I attended the annual CII conference in July this year and was really impressed with the quality of the presentations and tools that were offered. Construction Industry Institute, CII, was initiated by the University of Texas and is a collaboration between academia and industry to research some of the tough issues that industry faces and to come up with practical approaches and tools to deal with these problems.

Every year, CII selects a number of these tough problems and creates research teams comprised of academia (professors and grad students), representatives from owners, construction companies, engineering firms and suppliers to research these problems and come up with potential solutions. Each team has 2 years to do its research and to compile the results along with tools or guidelines to help address the problem identified.

Every year, CII holds its annual conference and the research teams report out their findings to the conference attendees. I would highly recommend membership in CII to anyone that is involved in engineering or construction.