requirements received to date, this project will take 6 months", may cost your organization a valuable place in a desired market. Imagine that you are an IT leader charged with bringing a new set of products in your industry to market. Market conditions are seasonally cyclical, and your company needs to be conducting business in those new product areas before the season ends. You have ¼ of the time to execute 6 months of work. How do we solve for a potentially impossible scenario when weeks to months of work must be done in days to weeks?Methods to handle this are not anything revolutionary. I've collected over the course of my career a series of ways we can successfully deliver in similar scenarios. The below won't work in every case but look for any opportunity to implement some of these ideas.Starting with the Obvious: Team & ScopeGather Your Team: Secure the participation of every function required to bring your work live. In so doing, treat them as the highly qualified masters of their craft that they are. Forget what your title is vs theirs. You are all on the same team, and regardless of their position vs yours in the organization, remember that you need them.Narrow Your Scope of Work: Keep your scope narrowed and do not deviate from it. Secure crystal clear agreement with your executives and key stakeholders on precisely what the finish line looks like, and drive to that finish line only. Reiterate the defined finish line to your project team and your senior executives often. Find Parallel or Advance Work Opportunities: Measure how much can be done in parallel and execute. If you don't have a signature on requirements documents but you have constructive knowledge in writing that can enable your work to start, get going.Maintain Your Control Environment: You cannot sensibly accelerate a process if you sacrifice elements of your controls framework. Work with your controllers, your audit teams, your regulatory and compliance teams. Make them part of your project team if possible. Work with them to ensure that any innovative solutions brought forth do not generate financial or regulatory risk.Optimize Logistics & Touchpoints: Not everyone has Microsoft Project on their computers. It may be 2022, but you are liable to have low-tech participants on your project teams. They may be senior executives. Do not absorb time trying to teach them how to use a new application when they can be contributing to your project as experts. Use the most commonly available tools to manage your work, like Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Schedule weekly meetings. So long as you trust your team to work independently (discussed later), weekly should suffice.You are all on the same team, and regardless of their position vs yours in the organization, remember that you need them19MARCH - 2023
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