Can you do away with the Project Initiation Meeting?

Project initiation meetings are often skipped to fast-track projects. Once a sponsor is found, organisations go straight to project planning and execution. But based on our own experience, holding a project initiation meeting can actually eliminate many issues that may crop up in the future and hence may speed things up instead in the long run.

It is in the project initiation meeting where your project objectives and scope are clarified and all stakeholders are brought to the same page. Project sponsors and stakeholders will have to know in a nutshell what is needed from them, what the possible risks are, what different resources are required, and so on. So that, when it’s time to proceed to the next phase, everyone is already in-sync.

So what are taken up in such a meeting? Perhaps an actual example can help. Sometime in the past, we set out to work on an eCommerce website project. After conducting the project initiation meeting, these were some of the things we were able to accomplish:

  • Identified deliverables e.g. site design, interface to payment system, etc.
  • Come up with the project phases
  • Agreed what should be in and out of scope
  • Defined the acceptance test criteria
  • Identified possible risks
  • Identified the possible training and documentation work needed
  • Established whether any analysis was required, e.g. as with regards to payment interfaces
  • Formulated disaster recovery plans
  • Defined roles and responsibilities
  • Drafted timelines and due dates

Aren’t these covered in project planning? If the project is a big one, the answer is no. In a large project, project planning is a much more exhaustive activity. In a project initiation meeting, only the basic framework is defined.

Some questions may still remain unanswered after a project initiation meeting, but at least you already know what answers you need to look for. In the example we gave earlier, we left the meeting knowing that we needed:

  • a list of all necessary hardware to estimate the costs
  • to identify possible dependencies we might have with third parties
  • to identify what software had to be bought and what skills we needed to hire

When it was time to proceed to project planning, everyone involved already knew what direction we were taking. In effect, by not skipping the project initiation meeting, we were able to avoid many potential obstacles.

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Business Turnaround Tip for a Successful MBO Turned Awry

When you acquire a company through an MBO, your hopes are always high. You know the business more than anyone else and you’ve got too much at stake to do a sloppy job. So how could things go wrong? Well sometimes they do. And if you don’t make a quick business turnaround, you could end up losing more than just your company.

If that management buyout was financed by a bank, then chances are you were required to invest a sizeable amount from your own pockets. I won’t be surprised if you even remortgaged your house for it.

Regardless of your source of funding, whether it was a bank, a venture capitalist or through a deferred consideration, the mere thought of losing your job and getting buried in enormous debt at the same time might be too much to bear. If you get too overwhelmed by your emotions and can’t think clearly, you’ll have to step out of the driver?s seat and have someone take over.

That someone can’t be a member of the management team that took part in the management buyout. Like you, he/she might be in panic mode as well. You need someone from the outside who has no emotional attachments to the company and hence can view the crisis from a clear perspective.

Here’s what’s needed:

Review and Plan

Take a closer look at all factors affecting your business: governance and organisational structures, employees, suppliers, systems and procedures, roles and responsibilities, etc. Identify potential risks and assess the likelihood of them affecting your business.

This will give a clearer picture of cause-and-effect relationships as well as the specific tasks on hand.

Thus, when it is time to draft a plan, you can do so from a well-informed standpoint. This will enable you to target specific areas of improvement and avoid pointless activities.

Assure all stakeholders

Once a watertight plan has been formulated, you will have to approach your stakeholders. They?ll need to know what your directions are. Once they’re all sold on the plan, you could implement our strategies unimpeded.

This is a very crucial part because a sceptical stakeholder can serve as a major stumbling block in our efforts to improve the situation. You need to convince your banks, sponsors, and investors in order to avoid additional financial obstacles. You need to convince your suppliers too. If they cut off or limit supply, you won’t be able to continue doing business.

Most of all, you need to persuade your staff and employees that the proposed major changes have to be carried out in order for the company to survive. You can’t run your operations without them on board.

Redesign and set up new systems and procedures

Any company requiring a turnaround will certainly have systems and procedures that are no longer working well in the current conditions and hence would require either major changes in key areas or a total revamp. You need to study personnel roles and responsibilities as well as systems and processes, including financial and IT systems, and supervise the implementation of necessary changes.

You will need to evaluate your existing IT architecture and determine how you can best maximise what you already have and propose what you think will work more efficiently for our proposed systems and procedures. Every piece of hardware or software recommended will take into consideration your present resources. There are many solutions out there, you just need to find the best fit.

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UK Hauliers Pull Together on ESOS

ESOS is what UK business needed, to encourage it to become more responsible for the environmental consequences of making money. Government has met with industry leaders to hammer out the finer details. Now there are heartening signs of intra-industry collaboration, for the example the FTA approach we discuss here.

The Freight Transport Association (FTA) is one of the UK?s biggest trade associations, and exists to represent the interests of companies moving goods by air, rail, sea and road. It is their representative at national, European and local level that advises them on legal compliance. In February 2015, it announced plans to help the industry comply with ESOS too.

The association has been active since the announcement of the UK?s Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme. It has engaged with government and membership through the portal of its Logistics Carbon Reduction Scheme (LCRS). The Environment Agency has singled this out as a benchmark other industries could follow.

FTA general manager for consultancy and tendering Karen Packham recently said, ?With our highly experienced and fully qualified team of transport auditors ?the FTA is best placed to offer practical advice and is able to provide specialist audits to ensure members are fully compliant ? and will gain all the benefits that the scheme has to offer.?

These co-audits with Environment Agency specialists advising, will focus on the full range of operational and supporting activities, and ensure that all haulage companies with over 250 employees do the following:

  • Assess energy use across their full spread of buildings, transport media and industrial activity
  • Examine energy-intensive pressure points and identify savings opportunities that provide financial benefit
  • Nominate an ESOS person to conduct future audits, or oversee and approve them independently
  • Report to the Environment Agency as scheme administrator per statutory intervals

Ecovaro has energy management software that turns metrics into high-level information that busy people understand. Give us a call if you are puzzling how best to present your data. We believe two heads can achieve so much more together.

Web Design and Development

The first few seconds of a first-time website visitor is very crucial. If they don’t like what they see or if they think it takes too long just to load what they’re supposed to see, chances are, that would be the last time you’d ever catch them on your site.

Therefore, striking a balance between your website’s appearance and its loading speed is important for first impressions. Once you’ve captured the visitor’s attention, the next objective is to keep them glued long enough for them to browse through your merchandise. It is at this point that the benefits of a well organised and highly intuitive graphical user interface come into play.

An excellent combination of stylish web design and sharp web development can play a major role in lowering bounce rates and increasing returning visitors. We see to it that our web designers and developers not only excel at what they do individually, but also understand the interplay between their individual creations and how it affects the overall appeal of the website.

This is what you can expect from our brand of web design and development:

  • Conversion-motivated web design. Since we understand that your primary motivation for entering into the eCommerce arena is to turn torrential web traffic into sales, we’ve put conversion as a primary consideration in our web designs.
  • SEO-friendly content. First-time visitors don’t reach your site because they entered your URL somewhere. Rather, they must have stumbled upon your links on search engine results or on other websites.
  • Engaging web content. Because excellent graphics alone can’t sell products but engaging web content can, we invest in excellent copywriters.
  • Visitor-friendly user interface. Before a visitor will ever read content on the current and succeeding pages, they’ll need to interact with your site’s UI first. We’ll make sure your user interface is visually appealing enough to invite visitors to click on your buttons.
  • Superior expertise in web development technologies. Our web developers are certified experts in web related technologies including Javascript, AJAX, SQL, PHP, CSS, Java, Silverlight, CMSes, and Magento, among others. Thus, we can offer extreme flexibility and scalability in our web development services.

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