Perhaps one of the most common issues I come across in business, and a key contributor to a variety of associated problems, is poor forecast accuracy. Poor forecast accuracy can affect a whole facet of key (critical) elements from cash through to resources let alone the obvious issues like inventory and customer deliveries. Unfortunately, many […]
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Why Excel is not a project management tool.
I’ve been around many companies in my time as a consultant and I’m always amazed by the number of business that uses Excel as their project management tool. While there are a great many Project Management Software tools out there Excel tends to be ubiquitous, it’s one of those tools that is on everyone’s desktop, […]
5 Example Quarterly Business Review – QBR – Agendas
A while back we wrote about the importance of QBR’s (Quarterly business reviews) – these meetings generally act as a diarised focal point for key stakeholders to gather to discuss progress on a particular topic. Common examples of QBR’s might be: * Project Steering groups * Supplier/Customer business reviews * Functional department reviews Whatever the […]
How many KPI’s should your business have?
Whilst I have to admit that there is some great KPI presentation software out there, all too often I see companies spending far too long on the cosmetics but far too little time at ensuring their KPI’s are adding value to their organization and are driving continuous improvement. business most firms understand how vital having […]
Key benefits of Engagement Management
There are a variety of operating models available for businesses and with each of these the way the customer is engaged and managed varies. True engagement management is a disciplined method of working that starts with the initial sales process and ends with the closure of engagement with the customer. This management approach will typically […]
5 tips for better Quarterly Business reviews
Quarterly business reviews are an important part of delivering a successful relationship between two businesses. Quarterly business review provides a mechanism where businesses can catch up with each other and drive actions to achieve quantifiable results for both sides. Unfortunately, all too often the QBR is seen as a session that facilitates one party “beating […]
10 steps to better business transformation projects
Business transformation is hard. Far too many businesses when faced with the gauntlet of change embark on a program that’s ill thought through, under-resourced and hamstrung by poor program management processes. Leadership then becomes surprised that little benefit is gained from perhaps years of hard work. Business Transformation programs are usually a strategy designed to […]
How to improve and redesign your process
In business, we use processes every day they are fundamental to a business functioning effectively and their robustness likely governs whether or not a business performs well. Poorly performing business processes result in cost, inefficiency, and frustration. Many businesses spend an enormous amount of time in reviewing, tuning and developing it’s processes that it becomes, […]
5 Essential questions for your next work appraisal.
For those of us lucky to be employed one of the regular challenges we have to go through is the performance appraisal (or performance review.) While each company has it’s own policy and periodicity for these lovely things (be they annually or quarterly or other) the chances are at you’ll have one at least once […]
10 Project Management apps for your smartphone
In our last article, we looked at how schedules can run away with themselves, when I put the article together I gave some thought to applications that can be used to help in the production of plans and tasks. Of course these days most of us carry around a mobile phone. Perhaps it’s no surprise […]