Trova il tuo prossimo book preferito
Abbonati oggi e leggi gratis per 30 giorniInizia la tua prova gratuita di 30 giorniInformazioni sul libro
Project Innovation: Gaining Project Success in an Ever-Changing Environment
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggere- Editore:
- Page Publishing, Inc.
- Pubblicato:
- Sep 27, 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781645841623
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
Is it time to innovate on a project level? Are you facing a project problem that your current practices and technology cannot solve? Are the time horizons of your projects getting shorter but the means to accomplish it have not changed? If you answered yes to either question, then you need to innovate on the project level. Why? Your company wants to be more competitive and will reduce the timelines of projects to fit more within the fiscal year. Your customers need to have more flexible solutions from the companies they do business with. Or, your industry is moving in a direction that your company is not heading in. These situations require the project leader to become adept at managing grass roots innovation on their projects. Books and blogs abound on the corporate innovator and how your company can have the next hot thing. But there is very little in the way of writing regarding bottom up innovation, and there is very little material out there for the project leader to navigate this path of innovation. This book takes the conversation to a new level, to one where the largest impact of innovation is felt; at the project level. We will discuss innovation through the eyes of the project leader and the project team since this book was written for project leaders by a project leader!
Informazioni sul libro
Project Innovation: Gaining Project Success in an Ever-Changing Environment
Descrizione
Is it time to innovate on a project level? Are you facing a project problem that your current practices and technology cannot solve? Are the time horizons of your projects getting shorter but the means to accomplish it have not changed? If you answered yes to either question, then you need to innovate on the project level. Why? Your company wants to be more competitive and will reduce the timelines of projects to fit more within the fiscal year. Your customers need to have more flexible solutions from the companies they do business with. Or, your industry is moving in a direction that your company is not heading in. These situations require the project leader to become adept at managing grass roots innovation on their projects. Books and blogs abound on the corporate innovator and how your company can have the next hot thing. But there is very little in the way of writing regarding bottom up innovation, and there is very little material out there for the project leader to navigate this path of innovation. This book takes the conversation to a new level, to one where the largest impact of innovation is felt; at the project level. We will discuss innovation through the eyes of the project leader and the project team since this book was written for project leaders by a project leader!
- Editore:
- Page Publishing, Inc.
- Pubblicato:
- Sep 27, 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781645841623
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
Correlati a Project Innovation
Anteprima del libro
Project Innovation - PMP Mark Sanzenbacher
Project Innovation
Gaining Project Success in an Ever-changing Environment
Mark Sanzenbacher, PMP
Copyright © 2019 Mark Sanzenbacher, PMP
All rights reserved
First Edition
PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.
New York, NY
First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019
ISBN 978-1-64584-161-6 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64584-162-3 (Digital)
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
To my wife, Karen, and my son, Alex, and daughter, Olivia. Thank you for your support during this book but, more importantly, through all the ups and downs of innovating.
The future belongs to the unreasonable ones, the ones who look forward not backward, who are certain only of uncertainty, and who have the ability and the confidence to think completely different.
—George Bernard Shaw
Acknowledgments
To Whitney Cull, Jim Jacobi, and Todd Maersch, my fellow renegades and mutineers. Without your forward thinking and hard work, we would not have had a successful innovation. Thank you for the journey we took together, and even though at times it was difficult, I would not have changed it for the world.
Introduction
If you have not already experienced it, sooner or later you will be faced with a project problem that current paradigms and/or current technologies your organization utilizes cannot address within the mandates of your project. As the project leader, you now must devise a new way to make the project successful, especially in current project environments in which project goals are tied directly to corporate goals. Now you may have noticed that I used the title project leader instead of the expected project manager. To me, the distinction between the two titles is huge. The project manager merely manages the triple constraint of scope, schedule, and cost. The project leader has a different responsibility of leading the project and the team to gain success for the organization, which involves a whole different set of soft skills than what is needed for managing the triple constraint. It will be the project leader, more so than the project manager, that would be dealing with issues involving project innovation.
In many situations, it will be up to the project team to figure out how to overcome the project problem you are facing. Do not expect that you must come up with the solution yourself; that is why you have a team. Tap into their expertise to solve it whether it is adaptive in nature or downright disruptive. Your job is to foster the innovative thinking, create the road map from idea to solution, and make sure the solution aligns with the project’s and the organization’s goals. Basically, you are giving the idea legs and a direction to run in.
A few years ago, I was faced with such a problem. Working in the utility industry, I was handed a project to rebuild a total of fifty miles of transmission line in varying terrains in the upper Midwest. The project team’s initial assessment of the project indicated that there were potentially three hundred, out of the total five hundred, structures that were prime candidates to be installed using a vibratory caisson method, which at the time was state-of-the-art. The vibratory caisson method involves vibrating steel poles into the ground using a vibratory hammer suspended from the end of a crane. The other method to install steel structures into the ground is the direct bury method, which as it sounds, involves digging a hole, placing the structure in the hole, and then back filling the hole with non-native materials. The vibratory caisson method was faster than the direct bury method, but it had its own issues, namely safety concerns (safety is paramount in this industry) and setup time. For each structure you plan on installing with the vibratory method, it would take forty to sixty minutes to just set up for the installation. This was fine as long as you had to install thirty or forty structures, but given the schedule constraints for the current project and the quantity being an order of magnitude larger, this method would not work nor would the direct bury method since it would require even more time to install than the vibratory method. At this point, the team realized a new approach would be needed to meet the management expectation of the project’s schedule.
I am a subscriber to the concept of the inner circle, especially since these types of projects have large teams and a long-time horizon. For this project, I had a project engineer, who had several years of experience in designing transmission lines, and a construction manager whose utility construction experience spans more than three decades with all types of construction methods and brought expertise in construction and safety. As we realized that we needed to do something different on this project, I brought into the circle a geological engineering intern working in our department. This person did not have much in the way of experience but was vital in gaining an understanding what limitations we had to overcome with soils and was an excellent researcher. So this was the group that began the process of creating a different installation method over and above all the work on other projects we were doing.
It was the project engineer who came up with the idea that seemed to solve the problem. The premise was to borrow existing technology from another industry along with modifications to our structures. The inner circle then flushed the idea out further through discussions on viability and detective work. We came to the point where we needed to try this out, to run an experiment to see if this idea truly would work as we thought. And as any good project leader, I had the group look at the risks and have a mitigation plan ready. I then turned into a salesman, putting together a presentation with the group’s input and going before management to request to move forward with the experiment and to utilize $100,000 of the project’s budget to make it happen. At first there was silence after the presentation, mostly to process what they just saw. Then the flurry of questions followed, which the group anticipated and created answers for. In the end, they acquiesced and allowed the experiment to proceed. The real sell came when I needed to convince our steel pole vendor and general construction contractor to participate in the experiment. Despite assurances that they would be paid for their respective parts in the experiment, they balked at it saying things like, It is not going to work,
or It is a waste of time.
It took a gentle nudge by our management and demonstrating it to them to get them on board. The project team outside of the inner circle was enthusiastically behind the idea and even pointed other benefits that we did not see ourselves.
The time from the formation of the idea to the first experiment was almost a year. The time to refine the design and the installation process such that we could use the method, with confidence, on the project installation was another year. Collecting and analyzing the performance data and declaring victory took another six months. All told, from idea creation to being a new tool in the tool box was two-and-one-half years. Certainly not something that happened overnight or by the end of the week. Now do not get the idea that the team was skipping through a field of roses as we went through this process. We dealt with issues with the steel poles
Recensioni
Recensioni
Cosa pensano gli utenti di Project Innovation
00 valutazioni / 0 recensioni