Personal MBA Summary

Josh Kaufman offers the Ten Big Ideas from his new book “The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business”

His book isn’t easy to summarize: The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business is a distillation of 226 of the most important ideas in modern business practice. There are, however, a few big ideas and recurring themes that will help you understand why learning business is so important… and how to focus on learning useful business skills instead of useless academic theories.

Read on... Personal MBA Summary

Understanding Marin County's $30 million ERP failure

The Board of Supervisors in California’s Marin County voted to stop an ongoing SAP project and seek a replacement solution, implicitly accepting that it wasted over $30 million on software and related implementation services from Deloitte Consulting.

The dramatic decision to replace SAP comes after relations between Marin and Deloitte Consulting, the implementation consultant on this project, deteriorated to the breaking point. Marin filed a lawsuit against Deloitte “seeking actual and compensatory damages of at least $30 million, along with unspecified punitive and, or exemplary damages and interest.” Deloitte has countersued Marin for approximately $550,000 in unpaid fees and late charges. SAP remains convinced that the software is working perfectly, and any issues in this implementation in no way reflect on SAP. So who's to blame?

The following article is a valuable lesson learned through another's failure. The lack of organizational preparation for a transformational event such as an ERP system implementation, as well as the lack of governance and the inability to manage the business changes required played key roles.

Read more about this learning opportunity here: Understanding Marin County's $30 million ERP failure

The Expectation Gap

Who ultimately decides if a project or program is successful or a failure? The simple answer to this question is that people decide. People decide based on whether the project or program met their expectations or not.

Knowing this, it’s possible to understand why expectation management is important, and how a project could be perceived as a success even if it didn’t deliver all its initial scope but did hit its planned delivery date, because the delivery date was the primary driver of perceived success. You’ve maybe even experienced projects where the targeted delivery date was missed, but the complete scope was eventually delivered, and the project was thus considered a success. It’s even possible to have a project that delivers its full scope, on-time and on-budget, yet is considered a failure. Once reason why this might happen is because stakeholder expectations were set well above what the project was ever going to deliver at the outset, but then these expectations were never checked or realigned to the reality of the project.

Read on...