Broadfront Technologies grew out of a realisation that large projects all seemed to suffer from the same problems. Despite, even because of the project management techniques that were employed, projects still foundered on the same problems.
Lack of Communication and Understanding For all the meetings, plans, documents and software, there were still usually significant problems due to a lack of communication that worked. Information would be transmitted but not received. In particular information transmitted 'up' and 'down' often suffered from 'interpretation'.
When coupled with the expected difficulty in giving everyone in large multinational projects a good, up to date understanding of the current state of knowledge - significant effort, time and money was expended to trying to make up for these intercommunication faults.
Lack of Planning and Foresight System engineering, and even project management texts, focus on the need for good foresight and planning to head off problems before they become expensive and difficult to fix. Despite this, so many projects were implemented where a 'rosy' view of progress was assumed - as well as a static world in which to implement the plan.
Too often the changes in the external environment and the foreseeable consequences were missing, even with minutely detailed plans of what was considered 'inside the box'.
Mismatched Project and World Timelines Projects are implemented to deliver real world benefits to the organisation that implements them. However when looking back on delivered projects it was often the case that 'it was a good idea then', but 'today we have different needs'. This was coupled with the fast pace of change in the lifeblood of a project, the individuals who's creativity and innovation turns needs into reality.
Once project timescales exceeded two years these mismatches became key in slowing progress and losing focus on potentials and possibilities.
Shortsighted focus and Gaming The art of project management would seem to be the art of forgetting the big picture and micromanaging the detail - at least from the empirical evidence demonstrated again and again. Because the detail is easy to grasp there was a tendancy for the PM to 'not be able to see the wood for the trees'. This was exacebated by a belief that because a task was defined and metrics set, that those involved would do exactly what was desired, rather than what was easiest. Not being able to see the importance of human foibles resulted in perverse behaviours and a focus on artificial games rather than project benefits.
Broadfront Technologies was an effort to find and provide solutions to some of these key recurring problems and to help business and governement to break free of the same old large scale project problems.
Broadfront Technologies is a trading division of:
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ONSci Ltd |
