ANALYSIS

Make sure your analysis puts you on the right track

Over the years, I too have struggled with the best way to look at a proposed project. If I analyze it one way, will that help the project be more successful and if I take it apart a different way will it be more likely to fail? If I sequence the activities one way, will I be wasting time on things that I could have avoided?

I think it is easy to understand this if you think about your last efforts to plan a family vacation. You started off wondering where to go. Maybe you don’t have an unlimited budget or unlimited time, and so you restricted your thoughts to somewhere that was not too far away. Or maybe you have a larger budget, so you looked at flying to another land.

You researched place after place, country after country, vacation houses and hotels, the transportation choices, and costs. It was great fun doing all of this work and learning something to boot. But in the end, you had to admit that you wasted a lot of time on things that didn’t matter.

That may be fine when it’s your personal time and you’re having fun. But when it’s your client’s time or your management’s time – that is called waste. And if you want to improve your results, you need to minimize waste. Time is one resource that you can’t create or recover.

And so, the Smart Projex methodology helps you follow some analytical processes and recommendations to reduce waste.

And just as importantly, it helps teams ensure that projects remain aligned with strategy so that executives can make solid portfolio decisions.