"Strategic Decision-Making: REACH and the Holy Grail

Overview: The article discusses a situation that cover important concept “reach” and “ holy grail”. It states that some PMs foul up their predecessor relationships or fail to level their resources and wind up with a team of four people assigned 10,000 hours of work in a two month period, but disaster projects often have a very different cause. The real disasters, those projects that organizations restart every three years or so, often fail because PMs launch them with the wrong "reach." "Reach" defines how far the project reaches out in defining its objective. Some projects do not reach beyond the boundaries of the sub-unit from which the team members are drawn. Other projects reach out and measure their success in the customer's eyes. If the reach of a project is wrong for the business situation that the organization faces, the odds of top management being satisfied with the project and its manager are poor.”. The Holy Grail are improving customer service, reducing costs or headcount, gaining market share or launching a particular new product. Now, savvy project managers and sponsors know that linking their new project to the current Holy Grail is the easy path to project approval and lavish funding. So organizations see a lot of project proposals that talk about how they will achieve, contribute to, facilitate or provide functionality for the current Holy Grail.

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Format: HTML | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 1