Comments on: “Obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings”

By: John H

John H — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:02:05 +0000

I really like your ideas about Scenario Imagination. I can see how they would help us all do a better job finding problems in our plans. I’ve got some major straget planning going on in January, and I’m going to try this technique out with our team. Thanks for the great idea!

By: Kevin Ertell

Kevin Ertell — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:46:05 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Chris. It’s easy to get so optimistic on big projects that you lose site of the problem. Certainly, planning a 90% probability of success can cause some blindness to fairly obvious problems. And your point about spending to unrealistic projections is a good one. Thanks again for contributing to the conversation.

By: Chris Eagle

Chris Eagle — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:07:04 +0000

This strikes me as being related to your article on why Amazon can innovate. Many companies ONLY look at the upside, or perfect scenario. Even when they do contingency planning it’s only something that really won’t happen and they only go through the empty motions. And when they deal with the problem that the dog got out, they generally only put in changes to stop the dog from getting out, not to prevent all of the other things that could happen because the door was open and unattended.
I have been involved with many companies where every project was planned to have a 90% chance of best case scenario and a 10% chance of almost-best-case scenario, and then got upset whenever the project didn’t meet those goals. Worse yet, they often spent to those projections and then ended up hemorrhaging money because they didn’t get the projected return.

By: Kevin Ertell

Kevin Ertell — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:55:55 +0000

Excellent points, Kasey, about maintaining the business case. Certainly, things change both internally and externally during the life of a project, and those changes can absolutely affect the original business case. I really appreciate you adding to the conversation.
Also, funny comment at the end. I laughed…and I cried.

By: Kasey Lobaugh

Kasey Lobaugh — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:16:10 +0000

Thanks Kevin for another insightful blog posting. My own experience says that there may be another element that is often times missing in an organization, and that is continual business case monitoring.
My experience says that organizations tend to develop a business case to get initial funding, but once that is done, the business case goes on the shelf. But immediately, things begin to change. Scope changes, assumptions prove incorrect, timelines change, costs overruns occur, but the business case is seldom managed as a living thing by which organizations continue to make decisions.
Just as important as risk management (contingency planning), and scenario imagination are, I would add on-going business case management to the list.
Reading your article brings a specific incident to mind where a client of mine said ‘Why do we have to keep talking about the risks, it just brings everyone down!’
Kasey Lobaugh
Multi-Channel Retail Practice Leader
Deloitte