Doing the Right Project: Using a Systems Thinking Approach to Select Successful Projects guide insight

Doing the Right Project: Using a Systems Thinking Approach to Select Successful Projects

It’s something of an adage that for success, you need two things:

To do the right project
To do the project right

Many failed projects are doomed from the start by being “the wrong project”, i.e. not designed to give a good chance of delivering the benefits needed. For almost four years the APM’s Systems Thinking Interest Network volunteers have been working on a guide to pick the right projects. We have focused on simple, quick approaches to spotting the challenges, over-simplistic assumptions, snap judgements, unexpected consequences, blind-spots and group-think errors, that must be overcome to avoid fundamentally flawed projects being commissioned.

This Guide is now in the warehouse and is being shipped!

For any proponent of systems thinking in the project profession, this is your opportunity to promote “looking (thoroughly!) before you leap” into projects within your organisation, and yourselves as thought-leaders in the profession. Do share this in your own organisations and volunteer networks, to get the most benefit from a lot of hard work and genuinely valuable insight garnered by many volunteer project professionals with over a century of cumulative experience and expertise.

Then come back to the network to contribute to our next guide Doing the Project Right: Using System Thinking and Systems Engineering to meet the need. We’re tackling this differently, by creating an integrated framework of short guides, supported by videos, podcasts and papers, that cover critical themes throughout the project lifecycle.

Andrew Wright
APM Systems Thinking Interest Network Lead volunteer