Project Lifestyle

Occasionally you stumble across a body of work that completely maps to what you are doing at that moment and it brings you to a complete new understanding of your activity.

A couple of years ago some colleagues and I were trying to assemble everything we knew or could find on business systems consolidation. The idea was to be able to put some real meat on the bones of the Single Instance message that Oracle had been taking to the market for some time. We had had some significant project successes and some failures as well. We wanted to understand what might be special about single instance/ERP consolidation projects and structure that knowledge so that our customers could also benefit from it.

Then I happened upon Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Ross, Weill and Robertson. This book helped me come to a much richer understanding of enterprise architecture maturity and how this concept binds a given business operating model to the underlying IT architecture that supports it.

Basically it explained to me how some consolidation projects had a great chance of succeeding while others would carry a substantial risk of failure from day one, simply due to a mismatch between the desired (enterprise) architecture and the maturity of it’s implementation in the client organization.

Here is a quick summary of why the Enterprise Architecture concept is important.

(Update 11 Nov 2008 – link to IMD article posted at bottom of article)

I recently attended an IMD Alumnus Event with the rather innocuous title Heineken: The Booster Program.

The fact that the event was being hosted by the famous beer brewer Heineken at one of their production facilities, with product samples available before and after the presentations helped convince me to attend.

The content of the presentations blew me away completely.

Prof. Corey Billington from IMD presented on how Seeker Solver networks are revolutionizing the innovation process. Organizations seeking answers to their business problems are using knowledge brokers like IMD or Innocentive (amongst others) to access wide networks of external solvers.

By doing this they find innovative solutions in 1/10th of the time and at 1/20th the cost of doing it purely with internal resources.

Heineken then presented a concrete example of how they had used this process, facilitated by IMD, to develop a solution to a specific business strategy issue.

The key underlying concept is that innovation is moving away from being an in-house DIY process of painful invention. In this age of Google and Wikinomics it’s faster to find an existing solution that someone already thought of and applied in another industry (where solving the problem might be a basic requirement to staying in business) and adapt that to your situation. Adopt and adapt.

An example might be a bank or industrial company struggling with the speed of opening new offices. They could check out McDonalds or Domino’s where rapid opening of new franchise locations is an entry requirement to just staying in business.

After sampling Heineken’s fine products I briefly chatted with Prof. Billington and got to thinking about how this paradigm of innovation would apply in the Project Lifestyle.

There are some great resources available for PMs in the blogsphere.

External to Oracle, I am enjoying Bas De Baar’s Project Shrink blog

Blog motto: Projects are about humans. Deal with that!

On the border between Oracle and the Big Bad World we now have Oracle Mix

Registration is free and I have set up a Project Lifestyle Group as a sister activity to this blog. Just to see what format is easiest for folks to participate in.