Counterintuitive ideas and some best practice tips to help you save money and improve your company's processes and project management.
With process improvement, companies can cut costs (and build excellent habits) by streamlining routine activities. This article outlines some counterintuitive ideas and some best practice tips to help you save money and improve your company's processes.
Let's start with the observation that some improvements are more valuable than others, thanks to XKCD. Their graph reminds us to experiment and prioritize the changes that save the most time and money.
1. Read 'The Checklist Manifesto'
Drawing on lessons from the aviation industry and his own work in medicine, Atul Gawande wrote a groundbreaking book called The Checklist Manifesto. He argues that checklists help everyone to improve quality, reduce mistakes and streamline operations—even highly-trained experts like pilots and surgeons.
2. Start planning your portfolio
It can be expensive to keep projects in silos. Segregated processes increase the risk of misallocated resources and budgets. The danger is that failing projects stagger on like zombies when they should be killed off or scaled back, simply because they aren't seen in a wider context.
The silver bullet is project portfolio planning.
For example, Athora Belgium adopted Planisware Orchestra to get a company-wide view of the projects it is running. As a result, project managers now have:
