Your Department Can Win and Enterprise Lose Every enterprise is a collection of departments. Every department is a collection of staff. And somewhere above all of it sit two goals that are supposed to matter more than any of the boxes underneath them: profitability,...
Complexity Is the Default. Simplicity Is a Discipline. No executive sets out to build a complicated program. Nobody opens a steering committee and says, "let's make this harder than it needs to be." And yet six months in, the program has fourteen workstreams, three...
Simplicity Is Not Simple Few of us are born with it. For most of us, simplicity is not a trait — it's a discipline we have to practise. I see this most clearly in transformation programs. Everyone says they want simplicity. Almost no one is willing to do what...
Your Transformation Does not Start Where Theirs Did Every transformation program rests on the same five things: technology (the systems and the apps that talk to each other), process (the workflows and the automation), people (change, leadership, ownership),...
Why Is It So Hard to Deliver a Successful ERP Project? If you're a project sponsor, you've probably asked this question at least once: "We hired good people, bought good software, so why is this ERP project still struggling?" Here's the honest answer: ERP projects are...
The Drama Is Real. It Isn't The Whole Story. Watch an executive get defensive in a steering committee. Someone asks a direct question about the go-live date, and the sponsor's jaw tightens, the voice sharpens, the justification arrives before the question has finished...
Incompetence in the Executive Suite We rarely use the word incompetence for executives. It sounds too blunt for people with the right titles, the right degrees, the right number of years behind their name. So we find softer words instead — bandwidth, style,...
You Trained the Tradesperson. You Never Trained the System User. A tradesperson cannot pick up a tool on day one and start using it at will. They are trained on it. Assessed on it. Reassessed on a cycle, to confirm the skill hasn't decayed. Certified against a...