“Doing more with less” by managing risks in a holistic way.

Most company executives strive to “do more with less” to boost the organization’s bottom line — when you are successful at this the company is more competitive, and that typically leads to improved profitability.  I like the way that Taylor Clarke (2015) articulates this notion: “Amid increasing competitive pressures, many organizations are looking to do more with less.  This has led to a plethora of initiatives aimed at stretching the resources and capabilities of the business with the aim of becoming more efficient and yield greater returns.”  The people with the job of developing and introducing new products (and/or deploying the new services) — the PMs, project team members, and performing organization’s management — are usually less than thrilled about this concept, for they typically believe that their chances of succeeding are worse when they attempt to do more with less.  This is especially the case for very complex projects and those which are highly scrutinized relative to meeting commitments (e.g., schedule, technical performance and/or budgets).  PMs and teams who are successful at “doing more with less” are invaluable.  Basically, the teams are asked to take on more risk — thus, how they manage risk becomes much more important.  This is a scenario that inspired my book, “Project Risk Management: A Practical Implementation Approach.”  Subsequent posts will touch on some of the particulars relative to how an organization which implements a holistic approach to project risk management can better enable this objective of “doing more with less.”.

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Clarke, T. (2015, June). Taylor Clarke—Taking care of potential.  Retrieved from http://www.tayorclarke.co.uk/solving-business -issues/doing -more-with-less/