In the executive suite, project failure is not just an IT issue—it's a direct erosion of shareholder value, strategic credibility, and market opportunity. The primary causes of project distress are often not technical, but a lack of rigor, consistency, and completeness in foundational governance.
Check Project Work™ provides a powerful, disciplined methodology to compensate for human error and attention limits, ensuring every mission-critical initiative in your portfolio is configured for success from Day One.
Checklists are not just for frontline teams; they are indispensable executive tools for enforcing execution quality and consistency across complex, high-stakes organizational change. They provide the necessary rigor to drastically reduce errors and elevate the effectiveness of every project team.
We provide business leaders with the OSSICPOET™ framework—a minimum, non-negotiable checklist for the business team to initiate and execute projects successfully. If any of these pillars are weak, the project should be immediately stopped and remediated.
| Pillar | Executive Imperative |
Governance Checklist Item |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Strategic Alignment & Measurement | Articulate and confirm that the project's business outcome is specific, measurable, and supported by all executive constituents. |
| Sponsor | Accountable Business Leadership | Engage a passionate business leader with the time, vested interest, and executive empowerment to make critical funding, scope, and resource decisions. |
| Solution | Clarity & Focus | Define a clear, precise solution focused only on the "vital few" business needs, avoiding unnecessary complexity and scope creep. |
| Investment | Mandatory ROI | Detail the measurable business case that meets or exceeds the organization's capital investment thresholds (or compelling, non-quantifiable benefits). |
| Communication | Reality & Safety | Establish an open, candid, "no-blame" culture where team members feel safe reporting unpleasant reality. Leadership's response to bad news determines success. |
| Plan | Agile & Fact-Based Execution | Ensure the plan is detailed, fact-based, and designed to deliver frequent, smaller releases (ideally less than three months) to mitigate risk associated with project size. |
| Organization | Talent & Bandwidth | Assign resources with the right skills and experience. Crucially, assess the collective magnitude of business change to ensure leadership has the bandwidth to manage concurrent transformations. |
| Execution | Discipline & Transparency | Enforce continuous monitoring, proactive risk/issue management, and rigorous, realistic Estimates-to-Complete (ETCs) validation to prevent budget overrun surprises. |
| Technology | Standards & Stability | Confirm all hardware, software, and methods adhere to organizational standards to leverage existing knowledge, minimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and reduce system risk. |
If the first four elements (Outcome, Sponsor, Solution, and Investment) are absent, poorly defined, or misaligned, you are wasting scarce resources (people, time, CAPEX/OPEX) and emotional energy.
Your mandate is to use the OSSICPOET™ framework to monitor and audit every project. Have the courage to take immediate, decisive action when any element is going awry to prevent dark, costly prose from defining your strategic portfolio.
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