2014 started with some good news for the British Car Industry and for Vehicle Finance. The latest figures announced by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders show that car production rose 3.1% in 2013, surpassing 1.5 million units. This is the highest volume since 2007, and is a positive sign that the UK economy …
Category: Risk Management
Jun 01
Painting yellow lines under the car..
The Back Office can party as well as any Sales Team. But at a gathering at the end of last year of Leasing Operations and Accounting folk, the festive spirit concealed dark problems and challenges to be faced in 2013. I carried out a straw poll and somewhere between a third and a half of …
Feb 19
Beefy Lessons for the FSA
The Food Standards Agency and the Financial Services Authority, as well as sharing an acronym, could both learn lessons about regulation. (I know that the Prudential Regulation Authority is technically becoming the regulator but the pun of the FSA was too good to resist). No tests had been done for Horse DNA in beef for …
Jun 17
The Global Project Managers toolkit
As you venture forth on a multinational project delivery, what tools you need to increase the chances of success? As soon as you start to cross borders, the geographic and cultural separation mean that the trusted team management techniques such as “Management by walking around” and “the team that drinks together, thinks together” no longer …
Feb 09
It’s time to kill big IT contracts
“I’ve met many programme directors who’ve said ‘I’m doing a £100m programme’, I say ‘I feel very sorry for you’” Phil Pavitt – the man in charge of the UK government’s largest IT outsourcing deal – believes Whitehall needs to end its love affair with supersized IT contracts. See the interview on Silicon.com : http://bit.ly/bRj2wU
Jan 08
I have a cunning plan..
Building your project plan is the most critical step in any project. Your plan is the basic way of measuring the progress of the project – and if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. If your project is to be successful it must start with a solid plan. Much of comedy of BlackAdders sidekick and servant …
Oct 13
Lets Do The Risk Warp Again
In this trilogy of blogs (triblogy?) we have been seeing how some basic intuition and understanding of projects can lead us to manage and master risks. Dont think all these charts and graphs are any great theory – they are just a graphic representation of common sense! Having understood the “cone of uncertainty” let us …
Sep 25
What have we got to loose?
Let’s develop some consequences of the cone of uncertainty – in particular the high risk and uncertainty at the start of the project. All is not lost down the cone of uncertainty. Although the inaccuracy is high at the start, the stakes aren’t high because you have no investment in the project. We’re talking here …
Sep 17
Planning Uncertainty
I came back to Mike Cohn’s great book on Agile Estimating and Planning. The Agile Manifesto that values responding to change over following a plan doesn’t at first seem to warrant a whole book on planning. It still needs to be done – as well illustrated by his quote : “A good plan violently executed …
Aug 07
Passing the point of no return
Pilots will know that when you are taking off there is a speed called V1. The plane has reached such a speed that there is not enough runway ahead of you to stop. So you are committed to take-off. Unfortunately V1 is usually less than V2 – the speed at which the plane can safely …
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