5 Steps for Successful Training

Unfortunately there’s something that organisations around the world have in common: most of their staff training programs leave a lot to be desired.

That might sound harsh, but it baffles me that so many companies (often with impressive products, processes, services or systems) fail when it comes to corporate training.

It’s a shame –after all there’s no doubt that a well designed and structured training program is essential for organisations to improve performance through its people.

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Marketing Stakeholder Analysis Fundamentals

Stakeholder analysis is the identification and examination of marketing stakeholder interests, influences, expectations and attitudes as they relate to a project (e.g. rollout of a marketing automation platform, standardized marketing reporting or data quality initiative).

Its purpose is to understand the political and people-oriented aspects of the project environment, and the processes and functions that impact (or are impacted by) the project. The result is a better understanding of the stakeholders (e.g. interests, relationships), better decisionmaking and greater project acceptance by stakeholders.

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Double Your Money In 7 Days Or Less!

Powerful pressures lure the most sincere project teams into over-valuing the projects they have been working on a long time. A simple question can alert leaders the numbers are unreliable.

You are the leader of a large organization and in front of you lies a proposal for a new IT project. You normally hate IT projects. They are usually are laden with incomprehensible acronyms & jargon and it is difficult enough trying to understand the problem they are describing let alone the solution. In this case, however, the team has done a smashing job: They have used plain English, all the right experts were involved, and the team achieved consensus for this recommendation. Best of all, the financials projected a credible and respectable 20% Return On Investment.

Now let me tap you on the shoulder and burst your bubble:

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Print Me a Liver

There is a scene towards the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Captain Kirk, being hunted by Khan and out of necessity defending his crippled spacecraft, maneuvers it into a nebula that disables both ships defenses and navigation. Kirk makes the observation that Khan, unlike the starship crew, is accustomed to living only in a two dimensional world, previously confined to the planet’s surface, and likely does not have the perspective to think in the 3D manner required in outer space. So Kirk launches an attack from underneath Khan’s ship, correctly supposing that Khan is only thinking in the right/left and forward/backwards dimensions, and not in the up/down direction.

In the business world we too are often caught like Khan, unprepared for a strategic threat from outside of our particular domain and comfort zone.

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Lost In Translation

Collisions between the Finance Department and… well, everyone, are the stuff of legends. In most companies, business teams are as likely to voluntarily ask Finance for help as a Russian citizen would ask the KGB for help. Instead, teams develop strategies to keep finance at arms length as long as possible.

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When Brains Are Not Enough

Even high intelligence and experience do not instinctively produce the BEST solutions.

Smarts and experience. Who could ask for anything more when assembling a project team?

How then do we explain the 70% to 80% failure rate on acquisitions? Don’t organizations assemble their A-team for acquisitions? Don’t they engage investment bankers– firms that hire the cream of MBAs from the top schools?

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Minority Report

When the U.S. Supreme Court justices cannot agree, the majority rules the day. Even so, the minority are still given a voice with a “dissenting opinion” – their public assessment of weaknesses in the majority position and their preference for an alternate ruling. Strangely, dissenting opinions are usually taboo in the corporate world.

I am asking business leaders, “Are dissenting opinions presented to the CEO along with the proposed course of action?” There used to be an occasional “Yes,” but in the last three months, the consistent answer has been, “No.”

When I follow-up with “Why Not?” a few themes emerged.

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Straight From The Horse’s Mouth

What do you really want: great analysis or your first impressions repeated back to you?

If you lived back at in the 1890’s, you would have been extremely impressed with a horse named Clever Hans. This horse correctly answered math and current event questions posed by his master by tapping out the answer with a hoof. He could even read and answer questions written out on cards by people in the audience!

Clever Hans amazed audiences for more than a decade before the truth emerged. No, the owner wasn’t perpetrating a fraud… the master was as shocked as everyone else to learn that Clever Hans didn’t excel in mathematics and world events. Where Clever Hans did excel was in pleasing his owner!

In 1904 it was demonstrated that the horse was looking for cues of approval. After the owner asked a question, Hans tapped his hoof until he perceived approval – perhaps a smile or a raised eyebrow. He had learned that, by stopping when he saw these cues, he was rewarded with an apple or carrot.

It’s not just horses that watch their masters for the “right answer.”

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Exceptional EPM / CPM Systems are an Exception

Many organizations over-rate the quality of their enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM / CPM) methods and supporting software systems as well as exaggerate how comprehensive and integrated they are. For example, when you ask executives how well they measure and report their costs and non-financial performance measures, most proudly boast that they are very good. However, this is inconsistent and conflicts with surveys where anonymous replies from mid-level managers candidly score their scaled answers as “needs much improvement.”

Every organization cannot be above average!

What makes exceptionally good EPM / CPM systems exceptional?

Rather than try to be a sociologist and psychiatrist to explain the contradictions of executives boasting superiority while anonymously answered surveys reveal inferiority, let’s simply describe the full vision of an effective EPM / CPM system that organizations should aspire to.

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No App For That

We are asking the wrong questions, not calculating the wrong answers.

During an initiative to improve capital project processes I was approached by a small cadre of project managers. They assured me that they understood the goal of improving problem solving and decision-making. Then, out jumped their true reason for our little meeting. “Dave, what we really need is our own spreadsheet template to enter the costs and benefits of our projects. We’ll be able to prepare proposals faster and won’t need finance analysts on our teams.”

This group misunderstood the initiative’s goals entirely. The overhaul wasn’t to make capital approvals easier or faster (although that was a collateral benefit). The overhaul focused on producing better projects. That doesn’t come from spreadsheet templates or black box analysis models. Better projects come from asking the right questions of the right people at the right time.

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