Let’s get geeky again.

Craig Mackay
Nov 8 · 6 min read

I posted this week about my Street Fighter II triumphs at Gartner IT Symposium (yes, I am still basking in the glory). As I wiped the floor with the younger generation, I told them how I’d recently downloaded the game at home so I could thrash my kids all the time (really frustrates them), even though they kill me at much more complex games of today like Call of Duty and Fortnite.

Maybe it’s an ingrained mental model that meant I could pick up Street Fighter after 25 years and still remember all the special combos. Maybe it was luck (yeah right). Either way, it reminded this grown-up at a tech conference where my love for this stuff all began.

If you’re a senior manager in tech or transformation, chances are that you — like me — grew up using some of the first home computers. Lunch breaks spent in the school IT lab. Countless hours of painstakingly typing code from a book into a featureless black and white screen just to make a slightly fuzzy ‘ball’ bounce around in the monitor.

Even if you’re more youthful than me (damn you), you were likely among first of your pals to use a games console, build a robot, surf the internet, even program a website.

We were the innovators. A generation unlocking fantasy worlds, writing in new languages, and daydreaming about what would come next.


Back to the Future

Fast forward 30-something years, and many of us found ourselves sitting around vast boardroom tables, poring over spreadsheets (well, I did anyway). The tech we grew up with has long been surpassed, but we’re just as excited by the machine learning and AI that’s replacing it.

The sad thing is, we don’t really get to play with it anymore.

Now, by accident or design, we are ‘change leaders’, tasked with realising huge customer-centric data-driven transformation projects. In fact, by 2025, up to 60% of our time will be spent delivering projects*.

The boundary between ‘business as usual’ and ‘change’ becomes blurry in a constantly disruptive world. Even in large, established companies we’re being asked to deliver continual change, innovation and agility; and be ready to pivot at any moment to keep up with the market (yes, it can feel a bit like bouncing around at hyper-speed in Sonic The Hedgehog).

But what we — and many of our colleagues — know, is that most enterprise project management practises haven’t moved on much in the last 20 years. They’re no longer helping us manage this rapid pace of change.

It’s time to call out the problem

When someone released a horribly bad computer game (I’m looking at you, ‘Hotel Mario’), we called it out. We re-boxed that thing and took it straight back to the shop for a refund.

Now, it’s time to call out archaic project management. It may have been fit for purpose before the turn of the millennium, but it’s barely changed since then. Project managers are still creating out-of-date manual reports from passive software. We’re still physically moving post-it notes around whiteboards. Yep, this is project delivery in 2019.

Think about your last stakeholder steering committee or delivery assurance meeting. How many times did you hear “I think”, “We believe”, “I’ll need to check” or — even worse — “I’m not sure that’s true because the information’s two weeks old.”?

Hardly data-driven delivery — your project teams should be telling you “We know”!

Nobody wants to be the person to say “this whole thing is broken”, but someone has to. You can’t deliver ground-breaking digital and data projects with a process that’s older than most of your developers.

Bleak? Not at all. Because no one really wants to be working this way. In project management, we can be the innovators again.

Brace yourself

I’ve led large scale transformations and enterprise programme management offices, and I’ve lived first-hand the pain of trying to keep a handle on everything. Balancing urgent delivery demands, portfolio budget challenges, constant reporting requests and change management issues… and at the same time trying to improve and add strategic value. No mean feat!

And in the same way that I default to playing my kids at Street Fighter because I can get quick wins, we revert to our default practises and tools to get the job done right now (that mega Excel spreadsheet with the VBA code we were so proud of in the 90s!).

Working like that, it’s hard to be an innovator.

But with 45% of technology projects currently over-running and 56% failing to deliver expected outcomes, how long can we put off the investment? AI makes project management smarter, more accurate and more efficient. It quickly saves more than it costs. And it’s not going away.

If you want to disrupt the market you operate in, you’ll have to disrupt the internal status quo. And like reaching the Bowser boss level in Super Mario 64, that means you’re going to have a battle on your hands — you need to team up and get some special powers.

The good news is you most likely have enough great people. You just need to enable them to be innovators too, by expecting more from them and incentivising them to try a different path.

Believe me, your PMO team hate admin, policing, chasing and report shuffling — let them be your delivery data experts, let them provide you with answers (not reports) and be strategic advisers.

Believe me, your Project Managers don’t value spending 30% of their time manually reporting and cutting & paste into PowerPoint — let them focus on value creation and making change happen.

Invest in the best, invent the rest.

Time and again, large organisations that try to compete with start-ups find a near-impossible challenge on their hands. Big business may have the financial and physical resources to embark on a software development project, but with time and focus being pulled in multiple directions, momentum slows and the gaps in expertise begin to show. The start-up, able to change its focus, direction and resources overnight, is always a step (or few) ahead.

Even giants like Google often opt to buy up innovation rather than develop internally from scratch. Realising the limits of your business is a strength, not a weakness (see Apple’s attempt to develop its own mobile maps) and collaboration often gets the best results.

In other words, you don’t have to be an inventor to be an innovator. You just need to invest in the right solution.


And now, the pitch (from one geek to another).

After 15 years of working on digital, tech and data transformation projects for large organisations, I joined Mudano to build Sharktower because I wanted to be part of the solution. And I genuinely believe we’ve created it.

In building the leading AI portfolio and project management software, we’ve given teams the ability to see real-time project data and predictive analytics, on a platform that can be set up, accessed and updated by every stakeholder involved.

It means decisions can be data-driven, and the software itself spots the dependencies and risks as soon as they appear. We’ve developed the future of project management today, and we’re only just getting started.

Let’s talk about how to make your project management fit for the future it’s expected to create. We can talk about Street Fighter too, if you like.

sharktower.com

linkedin.com/showcase/sharktower

@SharktowerApp

*Source: The Project Revolution, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

Craig Mackay

Written by

Chief Product Officer for Sharktower, the world’s leading AI-driven project management software.

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