Making room for new initiatives

Last week I wrote about a simple way to keep projects on track, I picked it as a topic because, with just 10 weeks until 2012 this is exactly the time of the year when we start to notice where we have woefully underachieved.

Of course, sometimes we just embark on too much.

If you hold annual strategic planning days, this will sound familiar: At the end of the strategic planning session the team feels super enthusiastic. The day has been a breeding ground for ideas which the team have translated into a long, albeit prioritised, to do list.

Then, endowed with the superhuman powers that come with enthusiasm, each team member agrees to take on a number of new tasks and responsibilities.

Within a couple of weeks those superhuman powers have worn off and team members are left wondering what on earth possessed them to agree to take on so much.

Of course, unless there has been a significant change in the business, the business doesn’t actually have a heap of extra time to invest in new projects. The new to do list is tough on the team and unsurprisingly, momentum quickly wanes.

In a nutshell – strategic planning days are guilty of having “eyes bigger than their stomach”.

Here’s a suggestion.

After the ideas have flowed and just prior to prioritising the to do list, take all the ideas and put them into one of three buckets:

• Bucket 1) process improvements – doing what we do today, better.
• Bucket 2) new initiatives – growing new stuff for tomorrow.
• Bucket 3) stop doing – yesterday’s good ideas that are no longer a priority.

Ideas in bucket one take “doing” time, but because they are easier on the brain than ideas in bucket two they tend to get done. There is rarely anything in bucket three (yet).

So, now you want to revisit the volume of each bucket.

• Bucket one is likely to be bigger than bucket two but you need to check that there actually is some stuff in bucket two!
• You need to put some current stuff in bucket three to free the team up to work on bucket two.

The fact that you and the team formally decide to “stop doing” specific initiatives in order to make room for new stuff shows – better than anything else – your commitment to the new initiatives. It’s so incredibly powerful that this simple sentence just doesn’t do it justice.

And how do you decide what will go in bucket three? Start by asking your team. The debate alone will be enlightening!

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).