Goal-Oriented Management: How to Deliver Big Hairy Audacious Goals

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An oldie but a goodie... here's a chance to listen to a webinar from Mike Hannan that will tell you how to achieve Unlimited Upside Investment with Goal-Orientated Management.

Stop focusing on 'meeting requirements' and rethink; how do I achieve my (Big Hairy Audacious) Goal?

Watch the Full Webinar Here

 

Projects that Changed the World

Let's start with four big hairy examples of projects that have changed the world:

  1. The rescue operation on 9/11 that successfully evacuated nearly half a million people from lower Manhattan, an unprecedented level of response to an emergency.
  2. A pharmaceutical company that doubled the number of life-saving drugs it brought to market each year without additional costs.
  3. Amazon, where new software releases went from <10 per day to 1 every 11.7 seconds.
  4. SpaceX, which cut the cost of launching cargo into space by 5x

We could fixate on the leadership, innovation and processes of all these organizations, but the truth is a lot of that is table stakes - the key differentiator here is that Goal-Oriented Management drove the organization to seek unlimited upside on their investment.

But they didn't just talk a good game; intuitive project management skills put in place all the components needed to deliver these awesome results. Sadly, world-changing leadership intuition doesn't scale (see Twitter...) but rethinking project management does.

Turn Project Management into Goal-Orientated Management

At the core of rethinking project management is a change of mentality. Let's explore this from four angles:

  1. Figure out your Big Hairy Audacious Goal: Great leaders set the bar high, but in such a way that success has milestones to celebrate along the way. After all...Luke didn't blow up the Death Star in the first ten minutes of Star Wars.
  2. Projects are Investments with Unlimited Upside: Don't just define project success by a hurdle rate ROI or, tick box versus planned features: think bigger. Be ready to flex and evolve to achieve as much as possible, not as little as necessary.
  3. 'Delivering Requirements' is not enough: A project manager is not a mailman, moving a project from A to B. They are, at their best, the champion that connects the work being done to the goals of the organization.
  4. Build Repeatable Scalable Techniques: "Thinking Big" is easy to say, but doing it well means turning a vision for changing the world into a structured model that others can apply. Sounds tricky, but it's not; Decision Science has an answer for this that we can apply right away...

Building a Goal-Oriented AHP Model

If Elon Musk wants to take humanity into space, this is a pretty hard criteria against which to make investment choices. That's why strategic portfolio management with a focus on Goal-Oriented Management needs to be broken into more practical criteria that, if delivered in totality will (with a bit of luck) mean that that stellar goal becomes a reality.

To do this you need Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). With AHP your goal is broken down into criteria, turning the high level ambition into more relatable practical components that together drive the outcome you're shooting for. With this model in place, simply add projects for a portfolio that will put you on the road to amazing.

 

AHP is proven, easy to use, and, with the right application, can turn a portfolio of projects into an unstoppable driver for unlimited upside.

So, if you've got a big hairy goal and an appetite for unlimited upside... let's connect! We have software you can see here, or reach out to Mike if you'd like to speak with him about how he can help you rethink project management to deliver goal-oriented management, with a generous side of unlimited upside.