Now it may be possible what not was possible before

Now it may be possible was not was possible without the general stop when all projects are running in the planned manner.

Situation before the crisis

• Budgeting is done once a year or in a 6-month cycle
• Investment decisions are made by 24% of decision makers by a financial model* - other do not use a modeling (decisions are made by a Committee or the highest payed person in the room HIPPO method)
• Projects are clustered to long running big portions of work, because that fits best to the budgeting process and that is the trained behavior over a long time in large organizations

Now the crisis appeared

• cost cuts were made - not precisely more on a general manner
• reducing all work outside the line functions (projects) to the keep “the business” running

 Your organization may plan already the recovering, re-start step, or maybe later. Now it is the chance to re-think about that and make use of the stop situation where a transformation would take years.

3 Ideas to make use of the situation

1. Plan to re-start based on value generating topics instead of the list of already defined but stopped projects
2. Re-think how you can extract the important, value delivering portions of outcome out of the bunch of stopped work
3. Cut the big projects into small portions and ship the valuable portion of outcome in the shorter portion of time

You will spend less in total, set focus and generate valuable outcome faster. In the next crisis you may not have to stop all projects and activities. Then you have the tool to adopt your spending to the financial situation and keep delivering as much small pieces of customer value as possible out of your adjusted budgets.

* Study by Forrester on behalf of ThoughtWorks Sep. 2012 - out of 161 business decision makers; Ref by Jez Humble