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Title: Connecting the Dots: Aligning Projects with Objectives in Unpredictable Times by Cathleen Benko, F. Warren McFarlan ISBN: 1-57851-877-6 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Insightful with practical advice....worth the read
Comment: I read about this book in CFO & CIO so I picked up a copy. For a book written by a professor and a consultant, I found it to be very practical and easy to understand. As a turnaround manager I read a lot of business books and strategy publications and was pleasantly surprised at how approachable, yet valuable the book was. I checked out the documents featured on the book's website (...) and found them to be very useful and comprehensive. In fact, I will probably use some of these documents as frameworks for a project I am currently working on for my client.
Overall, I think the book does a great job at outlining a practical framework and approach to portfolio management. What's more, the book's concepts and tools seem fairly easy to implement....which is always a good thing.
Rating: 4
Summary: Good idea - read it carefully
Comment: Book focuses on evaluating projects as portfolios. Focus is on alignment of projects with concern's goals (short-term, long-term, and in "traits" to handle globalization-world's uncertainties), with each other, and against the "world context." Book does state to check your guns at the door, and your slide rule, too. Approach is not quantitative as presented, and requires good faith relooks at projects. Individual tools are described to bring out misalignments, and list projects on a sheet of paper with the results of the tool analysis in a table form. Traits suggested are of four types, eco-driven for forming alliances and focusing on your own concern's strengths, outside-in for viewing yourself as stakeholders view you and adjusting your priorities accordingly, fighting-trim for being responsive and adaptable, and house-in-order for breaking down silo-thinking. Tools are in three groupings. One for traits. A group of three for alignments. And another group of three for reforming projects by looking for common threads, breaking big projects into chunks, and doing contingency planning. I don't believe I have the capability to assess the book further without trying it out, ideally in a group setting, against projects that people feel is important to them. I have, however, already used the book to describe my individual projects to senior management to place them in context and to gain leverage for the resources that I think my projects need.
Rating: 3
Summary: A workable and appealing alignment framework
Comment: Consultant Cathleen Benko and business professor McFarlan come into alignment in this tremendously practical book. Today's companies need to bring their misaligned, overlapping, and inconsistent projects into alignment through "frontier living". This means delivering results in the present while adapting for the future's business context by using four "traits" to configure your project portfolio for confusing, volatile, and unpredictable conditions.
The title of the book refers to the need to "connect the dots" between an organization's objectives and its project investments to create and balance present and future value. The book's plethora of tools combined with the easygoing writing style makes it engaging and painless to absorb. Benko and McFarlan can be forgiven for overstating the role of project alignment - that is, after all, the standard book author's tendency. It is true, however, that companies project initiatives total up into the trillions of dollars and it requires no stretch to accept the claim that those initiatives have grown faster than companies' ability to manage them. Benko and McFarlan focus on the project portfolio as the most promising key to unlocking value, arguing that the portfolio is a company's future currency. We find their underlying principle that "companies are better served by adapting themselves for the future rather than by trying to predict its destination" to be a sound one.
Alignment, in this book, specifically means aligning three drivers of business performance: a company's project portfolio with its objectives; the projects in the portfolio to each other; and the portfolio and company's objectives with the ever-changing realities of the business context. To prosper on the "information frontier", certain shifts in mind-set - "traits" - are needed. Along with operational short-term and strategic long-term objectives, these constitute the organization's *intentions*. Four traits are used throughout the book as each of the various tools are explained and applied: Eco-Driven (effective collaborations), Outside-In (looking at yourself the way others look at you), Fighting Trim (agility, coordination, and options orientation to deal with uncertainty and respond to change), and House in Order (provisioning the other traits to enable cross-enterprise collaboration).
The seven alignment tools in this book fall three groups. The Trait Meter assesses, plans, and measures trait development according to the four traits. Once this first step is completed (which includes creating an Intentions Framework), the second group of diagnostic tools comes into play: The Intentions, Sides, and Right Brain tools. These measure the nature and size of the alignment opportunity, identify organizational bias and sort projects into business activities, and identify change capacity issues. The third group of tools - Common Threads, Project Chunking, and What-If Planning - focus on building flexibility into the portfolio.
Working through the book for real will, of course, be far more challenging than merely reading it. But the authors have done a good job of clarifying important issues of alignment and have provided a workable and appealing framework and toolset for tackling those issues.
(3 stars from me is good. 4-star ratings are given too easily.)
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