Successful Teams Secret: Value Comes First

Projects play a central role in the opportunity realisation process, connecting an initial business idea to a commercial product or service by identifying, capturing and delivering its value.

Most businesses have adopted or adapted well-known project delivery methodologies, based on Prince2 or Agile approaches. They create scalable frameworks to adapt the project execution, its controls and assurance to the complexity and risks associated with the scope of work, with the ultimate goal of realising value by balancing speed and rigour.

Yet, despite well-designed management systems, sound processes and competent people, the actual performance of projects regularly misses its targets.

Businesses realise more and more that competitive projects are a key component of their overall competitiveness and have embarked on improvement programmes aimed at boosting their project performance, by identifying competitiveness gaps and understanding their origin.

Contrary to what might be anticipated, systems and processes are often not the main cause of poor project outcomes, people’s use of them is a main reason for the observed underperformance.

Indeed, during opportunity realisation a number of steps, outlined in figure 1 below, are particularly prone to misinterpretations, biases or mistakes, having a disproportionally big impact on project results.

One such misinterpretation happening early on in the project definition is the confusion between cost and value.

Cost is often cited as a driver for competitiveness by project teams. Issues arise when cost is disconnected from value for the end-user and for the business.

Competitiveness can be summed up as “value for money”. In other words, it relates cost to the user experience and to “return on investment” hurdles for the business.

But in order to get things right, cost benchmarks and understanding what drives user value are essential to design a competitive project. They requires an outward and inward look at what one is trying to achieve and a realisation that competitiveness cannot be achieved by looking in just one direction or at one dimension at a time.

Once value is adequately defined, competitiveness is then achieved by balancing it with scope and risks, through the subtle management of trade-offs between quality, design and cost, as depicted in figure 2.

Correctly defining the scope boundaries and the options at hand within them is a fundamental activity to find this optimal balance and build the value staircase, which will ultimately lead to a competitive prototype or concept.

Based on its experience, ALL4ONE consulting has developed the ALL4ONE TROPHY, a serious game designed to grow organisational competitiveness, by addressing the root causes of underperformance in projects.

This immersion into the ultra-competitive world of offshore sailing races re-creates the conditions, dilemmas and dynamics faced by corporations in today’s constantly evolving business landscape, where success is critically dependent on effective team collaboration.

ALL4ONE organises this event at your premises or at external venues, as a standalone training or as part of a more comprehensive organisational development programme.

For more information or to organise a free demo, please get in touch: [email protected]

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