Meet your objectives and goals! Resolve what really matters!

Reputation takes time to built, seconds to destroy and everything you got to rebuild.

In anyway, the best thing you can do to have success is to continuously keep eyes on what really matters to meet your goals. 

There are zillion causes of distractions, make sure that every step you make does have an impact or has a link towards your objective or goal.

The recipee: FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS THE MOST FIRST.


I will give you a slice of my own experience to illustrate how important it is to keep eyes on the objective no matter how hard, complex and difficult a situation or context appears. When I took over a multimillion contract a few year ago:

• the program had failed to deliver not even 5% of the contract after 24 months,
• was late by at least 12 months,
• was not organised to succeed,
• was not providing any visibility on resource requirement,
• did not have a fixed scope & fixed schedule, 
• prerequisites were not all met and not all understood by customers, 
• third party involved were not aligned to the master plan,
• turn around of staff had been a growing issue and
• roles & responsibilities were not clearly defined between client and us
• communications between third party's, team and clients were very poor.

The word that got around at that time was that our client did not believe that we could deliver the contract. By defecto, if your client does not believe in you, your competitors and press will be more than happy to point it out to you.


I knew, when I accepted this challenge, that it would not be easy but I believed strongly in the mission of the Program and could only see the end results we needed to accomplished. Well, some of my mentors and friends thought I was crazy. But hey, I believe that nothing happens for nothing and I felt that somehow, even if we were all over the place when I arrived, I believed in the team and thought that they just needed A DIRECTION.


Meanwhile, press, media, competitors and our own clients had serious doubts on our ability to deliver the contract. No matter why, the issues kept on growing and seemed to be bigger than the Everest! What can you say at that point, the program showed confusion, disorganisation and had red health indicators almost everywhere.


Here's what we did :

1) Understanding show stoppers - resolve what really matters!

Prior to my arrival, program issues were not captured systematically, they tended to be hanging around. The program manager would try to resolve issues on the go given orders to team members without documenting any of the solution trails and would react when an issue would be escalated to management. At the time that I arrived, senior executive would receive several calls and several e-mails from our customers in order to seek progress and confidence in the issue resolutions. With all respect to the program manager that was in place, he came with a disorganised environment and had a leadership style that would make things happen but unfortunately not in a pragmatic way. So some issues would be resolved but it felt that there was no proactive effort to resolve issues that kept on building on the plate.



This situation is clearly unacceptable, if you in your organization is unable to have control on issues and do not address them in a proactive and pragmatic way, you will certainly end up in the same shoes we were.



So when I came in, I told the team that we would not be resolving ALL issues at once and told them that we needed to focus on the issues that had the most impacts in our critical path. I believe it's a question on knowing or understanding what really counts and what really matters for you to deliver your project. Do not think you can do it all, start with most complex issues that are impacting your delivery and you will see endless outcomes. So when I came in, we identified 4 critical issues that were blocking our program. Without the resolution of those 4 issues we would not be successful in meeting our contractual obligations. So suddenly all of our effort when from all over the place to concerting the efforts with our client and third party vendor to identify solutions to resolve those 4 issues. For each issue, we of course identified an owner, assessed alternative solutions, came out with the recommended solution, identified actions to get there and target dates. When at our level we agreed between parties on the action plan, we presented the action plan to our executive committee and presented them to our stakeholders (in our program there are about 50 stakeholders as we are delivering our solution to several government sites).