Identifying opportunities, driving ideas forward in your organisation and leveraging them for success. 

Over the years I have worked with many different types of organisation in many continents. Most of them share similar highlights and pitfalls. Most of them can be smoothed over with a flexible project team and a great project leader, but by focusing on the project we miss obvious opportunities, like the gorilla selective attention parody.

Everyone is so busy and we often we focus too much on what we want to be, and don’t actually see what we are, we fail to grab opportunities when they arise and miss out on being more than we can be.

Warning, this elephant thing is going to be used over and over again, I apologise in advance. To compensate, I thought I would add some pictures

A mammoth task……

Many people talk about breaking the project down into small chunks and this is often referred to as “eating the elephant one bite at time”.
Just stop for a minute and ask yourself how this is applicable to businesses? Well more than you might think, the gory logistics of actually eating an elephant are very applicable to this process. What the idiom “eat an elephant one bite at a time” does is create a simple visual of an achievable line of progression to complete a daunting process.

When you think about it, the easiest part is saying “eat the elephant”, it’s a completely different task when you get down to doing it. If you’re absolutely determined you’re going to eat the elephant, then there are things you need to consider, why do you want to eat the elephant? Is all of the elephant edible? How do you go about preparing the elephant for consumption, common sense dictates that parts of the elephant will be easy to cook and eat, whilst others might need some errr stewing…
If the goal is to eat the elephant, then the strategy is how we go about eating it.

Elephant in the room…

Massive scale projects require complex input, multiple teams and sometimes multiple decision makers and experienced Management. They get broken down into manageable pieces, spread across the delivery teams, who in turn break the project down even further. The elephant is served up to the project team like an elephant buffet, which is standard practice in most organisations, but this creates problem.
Project Managers are focused on making sure deadlines are met and resources are available, their scope is about the project itself, rather than the purpose of the project. Resources committed to the project don’t see the whole elephant and when people don’t understand the ultimate result, they’ll never know how much is still to do, or whether it’s finished.
It’s pretty important for an organisation to maintain clarity in this regard. The right people need the right information to identify the right opportunities, what you’re trying to do is to look outside the proverbial window, so people can see the bigger picture.
Keep one eye on the goal at all times, communicate the goal and the progress. This stuff seems obvious, but it’s amazing how much gets missed, don’t get so focused on the plate you don’t notice the elephant in the room.

Observe the herd…

What happens when that elephant is a herd of elephants? 

Projects connect and touch in ways we never predict, tag them, monitor them, observe the herd. Overseers will find it’s impossible to observe the herd all of the time in which case it’s a great idea to get the “rangers” to share information and discussions.

A good example is the activity that takes place on project fringes, where some resources dip in and out of various projects completing tasks, eating pieces of different elephants, an enterprise juggling act which demands strict focus. Unless you are part of this project fringe, you’ll never be exposed to the potential opportunity in this space, because it doesn’t fit into your mental context.

There is massive opportunity for these resources to identify opportunity at this point, the areas where projects link tend to be spaces that are perfect for process based Intranet Applications, where small quick fire solutions can be massively beneficial to produce key data or increase efficiencies.

Identifying opportunity is the responsibility of everyone in an organisation, making sure that people understand this is a process of empowerment, established by culture.

• Value
• Validate
• Reward

There’s a lot of information out there about establishing idea based cultures and ensuring it’s success through validation & reward processes. By rewarding people for ideas it shows you value them, self-belief is crucial to an idea based culture, but you only want to validate “good” opportunities and the first step in idea validation is to qualify it. People should make a business case for it, which in turn, gets run through a panel of peers before it gets passed along for further acceptance. The basic principle is that people will put effort into good ideas, especially if there is reward. Be careful not to make these tasks too difficult.

Be transparent…

Make sure the process is transparent and accessible, this is not a suggestion box, or an idea graveyard, people need to see that their ideas are going places, doing things and hopefully being rewarded. This process will create a chain reaction of ideas, some of which can be incredibly valuable to your business, not only financially but as a culture cornerstone for getting and keeping the right employees