If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
–General Eric Shinseki
In the decade of the 1990’s, the average new product time to market in the U.S. dropped from 35.5 to just 11 months (Wujeck and Muscat, 2002). In order to keep pace, Execution and Strategy must change to immediately inform of each other. The map that strategy lays out is not the actual terrain; targets move, priorities shift.
To ignore this reality is to risk irrelevant results.
In proper context, project management becomes the partnership between Execution and Strategy. It stands as the crucial organizational function between thinking and acting – the nervous system that carries instructions from the brain to the hands and vision back from the eyes to the brain.
So much has been written about the fact that an organization’s actions need be aligned with its strategy that it now borders on cliché, but it is arguably more important that an organization’s strategy be aligned with a swiftly changing reality.
Correctly understood and implemented Project Management can do this.
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I like the analogy of the nervous system, it might be something to play with and further consider. If not the nervous system some other comparator than can be used as a thread throughout the book. Something patently familiar to anyone reading that cuts through jargon and makes clear the messaging.
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(comment posted by Bill, copied from an email from Ed)
I'm not sure I like the nervous system analogy. It reflects a subset of the execution capabilities themselves. It also is very close to the Digital Nervous System representation of BPM and BI.
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