Project management

What does it take to effectively manage projects whose requirements are constantly shifting?

How to get the most value from the investment.

And start taking action.

Marketers and finance people seldom see eye to eye. The makers say, “This product will open up a whole new market segment.” Finance people respond, “It’s a bad investment. The IRR is only 8%.” Why are they so often in opposition? The financial criteria used to decide if a project will be profitable are entirely […]

A good plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent plot, very good friends. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I Special Report When trying to assess performance, there is no business function top executives worry about more than marketing. Most of them look at the marketers in their companies as something between vacuum-cleaner salespeople […]

Scrums and kanbans can’t help you if you’ve got a legacy culture that punishes vulnerability.

From the moment I stepped off the bus at the rowing venue, I felt reassured that the London Olympic Games were operating like a well-oiled machine. There was an abundance of smiling volunteers wishing everyone a good morning, clear signage—bright pink—showing the way, barriers made less intimidating by the lively logo on them. At the […]

Four in 10 workers say that switching between tools is a major drag on their productivity.

Like zillions (or at least tens and tens of thousands) of other non-surgeons, I’ve been reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It’s a wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking book. (If you want the short version, you can listen to HBR’s Katherine Bell interviewing Gawande here.) Gawande convincingly makes the case that medicine — in particular surgery […]

Even at the prototype stage, experts were saying the technology was obsolete. Yet, in the face of tepid consumer response, the company stubbornly kept...

This technique, adopted from agile, can help sales teams achieve long-term strategy shifts, while still driving results.

AI-and especially its newest star, generative AI-is today a central theme in corporate boardrooms, leadership discussions, and casual exchanges among...

Match the person to the project.

A simple framework to manage chaos, get along better, and reduce stress.

When someone mentions a film unit, most people think of location shooting—depending on their generation it’s either Robert Shaw duelling the shark off Martha’s Vineyard or John Wayne and the U.S. cavalry charging through Death Valley! But, in fact, most major films are made in a series of predictable phases, of which shooting is only […]

Big projects fail at an astonishing rate--more than half the time, by some estimates. It's not hard to understand why. Complicated long-term projects...

It's one thing to set goals--and entirely another to get the people in your organization to actually accomplish them. To make the leap from vision to...

Author Doug Most explores the race to build America's first subways.

Thirty years ago, 80% of the resources in an organization were dedicated to operations, and 20% to projects; today, that ratio has flipped.

Uncertain environments call for experimentation. Here’s how to set up the trials—and learn from the errors.