- You may have heard the saying -
leadership is about doing the right things,
management is about doing things right.
In this video, I'll share the simple
but effective project leadership system
that I use to make sure teams are working
on the right things as they move forward
towards digital transformation.
Project leaders have six responsibilities
and they form the acronym - DIRECT.
We need to clearly define the problem or opportunity
that our project is focused on.
For example, every project should have a project charter
that clearly explains the scope of the project,
why we're doing it and how much we expect it to cost.
Then, we need to investigate options.
That means performing due diligence
to consider the best ways to achieve our business goals
and carefully considering alternative approaches.
Once we've looked at all of the options,
we need to resolve to a course of action.
We need to create a project plan
that makes sense for the organization
and get agreement from our stakeholders to move forward.
Then, we need to execute the plan.
We need to make sure everyone on the team understands
what they need to do and we need to track their progress.
Of course, that also means we need to deal with surprises
that come up along the way
and make changes to the project scope as needed.
The goal of any digital transformation project is to change
the way something is done in our supply chain.
Project leaders need to make sure
that there's a solid plan in place
for how that change will occur
and how the team will respond
if there are unexpected problems with the implementation.
And the last responsibility of a project leader is
to help people transition
from the current state to the future state.
For our end users and customers,
we might need to provide training and technical support.
For our project team members,
the transition could involve moving on to another project
or a new job.
A project can have effects on lots of different people
and leaders need to take
all of our stakeholders into account.
As we help organizations through digital transformation,
we'll be leading lots and lots of projects.
As leaders, we need to define the objective,
investigate the options, resolve to a course of action,
execute the plan, change over to the new processor system
and transition the people who are affected by the project.
Focusing on your direct risk responsibilities will help
to ensure that all of your project teams are successful.