A Recipe for Guaranteeing Failure - The Misalignment of People, Process, and Projects with Performance

I had the pleasure of recording a podcast led by Michael Krigsman with Naomi Bloom entitled Enterprise unplugged: Riffing on failure and performance.  Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures and writes the popular ZDNet blog on IT Project Failures. I have been most impressed by his steadfast dedication to cataloging in great detail the root causes of IT project failures in an effort to ensure a higher success rate.  If you are a practitioner in any aspect of project implementation, including Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management, his blog is a must read.

Naomi Bloom is a top consultant, analyst, writer, and thought leader throughout the HRM delivery system (HRMDS) industry.  She just launched a great site at In Full Bloom that I am certain will become one of the de facto destinations for HRM related information in short order.  To launch her blog, she wrote two fantastic posts on HRM measurement, The Road From HRM To Business Results Is Littered With Misguided Metrics Part I and Part II, that honestly could have come directly from Driven to Perform.  I sincerely respect her integrity, no-nonsense approach, and phenomenal amount of domain knowledge in her space.

Given our three areas of expertise, we converged fairly quickly on the theme "A Recipe for Guaranteeing Failure  - The Misalignment of People, Process, and Projects with Performance".  Every successful initiatve in the enterprise must start from the outcomes a business is trying to achieve, whether its a new series of HR initiatives, a new series of IT projects, or a new series of Business Intelligence initiatives.  Without constant, focused, and diligent effort to ensure alignment between the elements of people, process, projects, and performance, failure is all but guaranteed, a message that I internalized from my time working closely with Jonathan Becher, former CEO of Pilot Software and now SVP of Enterprise Solution Marketing at SAP.  We also discuss some really exciting ideas of the visual metaphors by which performance management can evolve into a discipline that can truly touch every person in a company by helping them understand exactly how one change in the enterprise impacts all the others.

Please listen read Michael's blog post and listen to the podcast and as always, your feedback is welcomed in the comments.  Enjoy!