This is Part Two to Plan Fully Then Execute Fully

You can find Part One at here

Once you’ve completed your planning fully, you’re ready for execution. The execution overview is simple, but that doesn't mean the steps are easy.

The steps are straightforward but, in many cases, getting the answers you need takes time. Getting the time you need is even harder. With that in mind, the planning and execution process are designed to help you prioritize actions with the understanding that you have limited personal time and resources. That's why you prioritize stakeholders by the ones that have the highest impact first. That's also why you need to plan for what your expected outcomes should look like (and when you expect to see them). This is how you strike a fine balance between giving an initiative enough time to show progress versus waiting passively until someone else calls an end to your project.

Execution Steps:

Develop your communication strategies:

• What stakeholder?
• What...

This blog comes courtesy of one of our students. At the end of an intensive course, he sat back and reflected that half of what we taught was based on getting aspiring and improving leaders to actually do the preparation work and the other half was following through on execution.

It was a great summary, but out of context, it doesn’t tell anyone outside the class much.

To make it more useful, we’ll dig a little deeper into each of the areas. The purpose is to give you an overview so you can build your own map.

Doing the preparation work is hard for some people. Some people are good at starting but not finishing. Others are good at finishing, but don’t know where to start.

The preparatory work happens on 2 levels: the big picture (the long game) and the immediate.

Big picture preparatory work includes:

1. Understand your organization, your customers and how value is created
2. Understand your role in the organization and how that connects to customer value
3. Understand the...

If you're following from last week, you probably expected this to be a post about Personal Power. So did we... But sometimes client projects and client problems give us an opportunity to share insights and experiences in almost real-time.

This week is one of those weeks. In that, the title is fitting: There are always trade-offs.

There will always be trade-offs and compromises required. There is often no ‘perfect’ way to move a project forward, and this includes IT projects. The key is to be able to understand the trade-offs and risks and to consciously manage those risks in whatever path you choose to move forward with.

A case in point is a recent customer project. This was a very large, very high-visibility project that had job implications for directors and vice-presidents in the organization. We were brought in to conduct an external 3^rd party design review prior to launching.

When large projects are being led by IT, especially in the private sector, there are a few...

Welcome back everyone!

One of the great parts of blogging while you're in the middle of other major projects is that every day's meetings and interactions give you more topics to write about. This week had it's fair share of interesting interactions, but you'll have to tune in later for those since we're in the middle of a two-part series.

In Part 1, we saw that leading change could be broken down in to two distinct phases based on the different activities and different emphasis on communication between the Initiation Phase and the Implementation Phase. We focused our efforts in Part 1 on the initiation phase. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it [here].Even if you have read it, sometimes it's good to recap.

There are two parts to Leading change: the first part is about developing the change initiative, and the second part is about implementing the change.

The kinds of things you do, as a leader, and the kinds of conversations you have are different in each of these...

Leadership is all about change. It’s about initiating and executing on activities that bring about positive change. From an organizational perspective positive change is change that delivers value to the organization and its customers, through innovation or through increased efficiency.

It’s been a challenge to try to summarize many of these concepts on leading change, because each and every section below could have pages or books written on it.  Not only will we be writing more to fill in those gaps, but your feedback and requests in the Facebook group will help us choose what to expand on next. Your questions and comments also help determine what kinds of tools and resources we publish! 

Back to the discussion on change leadership.

There are two parts to Leading Change: the first part is about developing the change initiative, and the second part is about implementing the change.

The kinds of things you do, as a leader, and the kinds of conversations you have...