Pols Consulting

Here are some tips I picked up this week from a friend. He has just started at a new company. His new company has lots of projects without any clear indication of their business value. So he got them to draw a matrix like this (an evil 2×2 consultancy as it’s known in the trade):

He then asked everyone to place their project in the appropriate box!

This really helped people think about the business value. Just trying to justify the position in the box, makes you think about the value of the project. We’re not just doing projects for doing them sake (hopefully).

It was surprising how many high-risk, low value projects appeared on the grid! You can now ask “Why are we doing these?”, followed by, “Shouldn’t we be investing our energy elsewhere?”

The best bit of advice came at the end. I asked him, “But won’t they simply do the chart to humour you, and then return to their old ways?”

“Don’t be silly, I’ll just keep giving people more work until they stop working on non-important stuff!”

Still, I thought it was an interesting technique that was worth sharing.