ROI Measures One Thing. Success Is Many Things. Ask an organisation how it knows its ERP worked, and the answer usually arrives as a number. Return on investment. It's a fair place to start. But it's only a place to start, and it's worth walking through, one step at a...
Power Is Given. What You Do With It Isn't. Here are four ways leverage arrives: You're the customer someone else depends on. You sit in the executive chair. You hold specialist knowledge nobody else in the room has. You control a product or service nobody else can...
The Customer Who Pays Isn't Always the Customer Who Matters Every disaster in service and delivery starts the same way: someone picked the wrong customer. A doctor who prescribes based on what a pharmaceutical company favours, rather than what the patient actually...
Engagement Isn't a Communication Problem. It's an Exchange Problem. Every technology program has the same complaint eventually: business stakeholders won't engage. Steering committees where the sponsor skims their phone. Status meetings attended by a deputy who...
You Don't Choose Your Direction. You Choose Your Problems. Your direction in life isn't something you decide once and then follow. It's a byproduct — the residue left behind by the kind of problems you keep choosing to solve, repeated often enough that it hardens...
The Body Has a Cure for Parasites. The Mind Has None. Watch an animal weakened by a parasite and you see something almost unbearable to look at — a creature slowly drained of the energy it needs to live, with very little agency to stop what's happening to it. If it's...
Governance Protects the Boundaries. One of the key functions of project assurance and governance rarely gets said out loud: it exists to protect boundaries. Not to police people, not to slow anyone down — to protect the line between what's approved and what isn't,...
Every Trick Has a Price. It's Paid in Trust. Every ERP vendor has a version of the same script. The upsell that arrives once you're committed. The contract clause that makes leaving harder than staying. The auto-renewal nobody points to until it's already renewed. The...