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You are the most powerful project management
tool
you will ever use
The Mastering Projects Approach
True North's Mastering Projects approach brings a practical system and set of tools and techniques that anyone can apply to any project. This systemic approach is based on a deep understanding of the collective creative process and a set of common sense principles. The Mastering Projects system works to move project work beyond simple planning, tracking, controlling, and task completion to relational, generative, and inherently engaging work that produces exceptional and very satisfying real-world results.
The Entrepreneurial Difference
Projects embody the entrepreneurial function of our organizations. We use project and program to create new products, new technologies, and new futures for our companies. Importantly, projects are fundamentally different from ongoing operations.
On-going operations require stability, consistency, and predictability.
Projects demand adaptability, creativity, and discovery. Operations respond
to management control. Projects require leadership of an entirely
different order.
So why do we continue to disappoint ourselves by applying operations
style management techniques in unsuccessful attempts to reform our projects?
The Mis-Match
The mismatch between the operational orientation of traditional
project management and the real-world needs of innovation is the source
of most commonly encountered project difficulties.
Traditional approaches
Traditional project management methods are modeled after management
approaches designed to optimize on-going operations. These methods assume
conditions that are rarely, if ever, fully present in today's projects:
- Stable and controllable internal and external environments
- Fixed, predictable, knowable requirements
- Predictable, consistent, and scheduleable inputs
- Easily exchangeable, readily available resources
- Known methods and tools
- A known and unambiguous sequence of specific tasks
- Known, fully specified outputs
Real Projects
Most projects are chartered to create something that has never
existed before within a very different set of conditions:
- Dynamic and uncontrollable environments driven by rapidly changing customer, market, and resource demands
- Conflicting requirements, creeping scope, and unreasonable demands
- Emerging technology, methods, and tools (or novel applications of known methods and tools)
- Scarce, specialized skills held by key individuals with strong personalities
- Uncertain and unknown paths to fuzzy destinations through uncharted territory
- Shifting, ambiguous, and conflicting objectives
The conflicts between our operational understanding and the ground-level demands of project work leave us tangled in unresolvable paradoxes. The result?
- Death march efforts
- Disappointed customers
- Dis-engaged, discouraged contributors
- Frustration and failure
It does not need to be this way.
The Mastering Projects approach addresses the clear difference
between operations, and project work. True North proposes clear, workable, practical approaches to addressing the source of project difficulties. These powerful, practical tools help you and your organization more effectively cope with the unavoidable, real challenges of project work.
The portals to the Mastering Projects approach include our Mastering Projects Workshop and Mastering Project Work.
To bring True North's breakthrough project training to your organization, contact us today!
To learn more, contact us at (509)527-9773 or by email at
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