Most likely, yes! Companies here in South Africa and around the world are routinely spending hundreds of millions (insert your currency) on initiatives that are seldom integrated and strip away valuable time and focus from your existing resources. Not only that, but the result and impact of those initiatives are often hard to quantify. What is the real value delivered?

Special projects and initiatives often put additional strain on company resources and take valuable time away from day-to-day operations. Ask any manager or leader in a business what wastes their time and you’ll be sure to get three common answers;

1. too many initiatives and
2. too many meetings (most of them of course about the initiatives) and
3. slow decision making. According to Harvard Professor Robert Kaplan, companies introduce an “abundance of projects [that] compete for limited resources including: Human Capital, IT and Financial”.

Sorry guys, but you appear to be the main culprits and while your projects may provide useful support services to the group, the value of those projects remains hard to quantify in other parts of the business.

Why? According to Kaplan there is “no integrated view across business units”, what Tom Peters would call “a lack of cross functional integration”. Divisions and departments act in isolation of each other seldom coming together to prioritize their projects and activities with their peers. The net result is commonly called a “silo organisation” a way of operating divisions within the business compete with each other internally rather externally, in the market. Who wins? Generally the competition, who, to be fair, are possibly struggling with similar challenges. In short, the fight is happening on the wrong side of the fence.

The systemic consequence (a clever way of saying the knock on effect) of silo thinking impacts employee morale and organisation performance. Companies end up fat, with too many heads pulling in different directions, or internally political, with leaders and teams fighting for attention, resource and budget. Put that kind of thinking into the workforce and the net result is a plethora of headaches for which no pill can easily cure. Layer into this the challenges that come with a matrix structure, and then the real complaints come: we are pulled in too many directions, we don’t have the time, we’re in too many meetings, the goal is not clear, we don’t have the skills.

Kaplan goes on to add that there is often “[no clear] distinction between strategic and operational project efforts”. Poor prioritization and lack of integration appear to be the basis for a slew of unorganized and, at times, chaotic activity. This renders senior decision makers with an inadequate view of the real performance of the business, and leaves the implementation teams (managers, supervisors and employees) grinding hard at things without really understanding their value or impact.

Understanding how to prioritize initiatives and projects is just one of the insights Professor Kaplan will be sharing at this year’s BRG Conference on Strategy Execution co-hosted by GIBS and sponsored by STRATX. If resource optimization and project prioritization fits into your scorecard, then this is a day not to be missed. Learn how the father of the Balanced Scorecard and Activity Based Cost Accounting can shed new light on initiative management in your business.

For more information visit //www.brg.co.za/speakers/prof-robert-kaplan/ or call BRG on 0861 B GREAT

**On the 17^th September 2015, Harvard Business School, Professor Kaplan, Internationally acclaimed Lifetime Contributor to the Management and Accounting Profession will present a full day programme at The BRG Progress Conference on Executing Strategy taking place at Theatre on the Track, Kyalami Johannesburg. This year’s programme will feature Leadership, Risk, Finance, People and Project priorities.