Skip to main content

The Triangle is missing The Circle

By experience -the bad one of course- I discovered that the famous Project Management triangle is missing a very important containing circle… The Strategy Circle.
The Strategy Circle is my simple explanation for many of the catastrophic situations projects end up with. I totally believe that this should not happen and that Strategy exists to set goals and directions for the benefit of organizations and accordingly for the benefit of projects and teams.
Unfortunately, I witnessed many cases where it was exactly the opposite. I was an eye witness of the failure of many projects and sometimes companies because of misunderstanding the meaning of Strategy and how to use it to bring companies to success. Some companies bankrupted because of this!
TriangleCircle

De-formation Effect

The Strategy Circle is sometimes surrounding the Project Management triangle and thus imposing pressure on it and suppressing it and some other times it is pushing on the triangle from the inside and thus inflating it. This circle is a vortex that if not used wisely can and will swallow projects and maybe companies themselves.
TriangleCircle-2

By The Name of Strategy!

The magical Strategy word is misused to commit many crimes against projects and teams. Some PJs use this word to convince you that loss is a gain and that you should sacrifice everything in the world even yourself for it. They use the “We’re building glory” illusion to suck your blood and to burn you and your teams. Some people misuse it by thinking that Strategy has to focus only on business and not on profit or even revenue! I don’t understand what can be the use of owning a business if it doesn’t generate money. P.S. I am fully aware of the difference between loss and investment.

Strategizing by Fear

There is also a newly introduced concept… The Strategizing by Fear concept in which PJs use the company image argument as a cover for bad decision making, mistakes and failures. They use the Strategy ghost to frighten you all the time and to make sure you are under pressure and under their control.
I really empathy Strategy! It’s abused, oppressed and maltreated in many places!







Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle of Tactics

Sometimes referred to as the Triangle of Horror… where the PM tries his best to maintain his balance while walking on the very thin project rope between this triangle and the Project Constraints Triangle (time, cost & scope). The triangle sides represent: The Team, The Client and The Management Every side of this triangle is obsessed by the sole idea that the other two sides want him dead, i.e. the team thinks that the client and the top management want him dead and vice versa. Usually a good PM gets lost while trying to maintain this triangle in good shape to keep all parties satisfied and happy while making them think they are his first and only priority to get out what is needed from them for the sake of the project. From my perspective, this is a much harder balance to keep rather than maintaining and managing the Project Constraints Triangle… It highly depends on people, their culture, maturity level, and on the PM’s ability to understand this and deal with it in a ...
4 comments
Read more

I am a Project Manager

I am a Project Manager and I love my job… I am a project Manager and I love doing my work! I am nothing more but a Project Manager amongst many others. I got married to my work (not job) after a great love story which started from early childhood ( coming soon ). I started my career as a Software Developer in the late 90s, then held many positions in the field of Software Development, some were promotions and some were kind of additional assignments due to my performance. Among the positions I held are Developer, Team Leader, Project Manager, Project Leader, Senior Project Manager, Senior Project Leader, Program Manager, Business Analyst… though I was dreaming about becoming an Architect! But seriously the job I loved the most is Project Management. The things I hated the most in my early years were politics and economics/finance, which both became the core of my daily work for some years now! 94% of my experience was built by working in Software Houses as a vendor/provider and ...
4 comments
Read more

RPM Technique

I once used a very weird technique with my team to get things done in a short duration in a project that was very far away from being on schedule… For a while I’ve been asking my team for their progress, following up heavily and on daily basis, staying late with them in the office and sometimes staying till the next morning (online from home), trying to dig deeper by developing and testing with them…. And still we were very late in achieving any of our internal milestones… By time, I was empathizing them and I was trying my best to reduce the effect of the pressure under which they were put for a long time. We started a weekly game competition with some funny yet work-related rules, amongst which was “ each member in a sub-team should finish his work before the day of the competition ”… it went fine for about 3 weeks, then the situation became worse… and we all stopped participating in the competition… I then tried another technique… I started buying them either lunch or dinner in ...
4 comments
Read more