Strategic Project Management Made Simple: Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams

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Building Strong Project Backbones

If one link is broken, the entire chain is broken.

—Yiddish Proverb

 

 

 

As a consultant, my primary job is to empower my clients with powerful concepts and coach them to reach great solutions. All great solutions begin by asking the right questions. My major contribution to the field of Strategic Project Management is these Four Critical Strategic Questions, which I developed to make the Logical Framework Approach, (as you’ll see in Chapter 3) easier to understand.

These seem like simple questions—that’s exactly the point. They are indeed simple, but not simplistic. It took multiple refinements over several years in order to progressively simplify them while preserving their power to integrate multiple points of view. Albert Einstein famously said that if you can’t say something simply, you don’t understand it. I agree with Al.

The four following carefully crafted questions work wonders in virtually any situation. The first three are usually glossed over in the rush to answer the fourth.

Asking the Four Critical Strategic Questions

The call came from Keith, an Information Technology (IT) manager who had attended one of my strategy workshops at UCLA. He worked in a well-known company that needed to launch a critical initiative, but their task force had made little progress after several frustrating meetings. Keith invited me to facilitate their next discussion, which would be attended by a cross-section of company personnel with heavy representation ...