Project Leadership ― Creating Value With an Adaptive Project Organization

"Introduction I forget the date, but it was somewhere around 1998; my employer at the time was in the middle of a number of important launches for several customer organizations. Some were going very well, while others were collectively raising the bloodpressure of the organization and its extended enterprises. Most of you have been in similar situations, where launches that go well are quietly (or otherwise) celebrated, and difficult projects are remembered with a grimace and a tongue-in- cheek, "Well,at least no one died." Our president would on occasion remind me, "Barry, you can't buy training like this." At the time, I was vice president of large illuminated objects, or some such thing, and the leadership team was burning the candle at both ends trying to keep the balls in the air, the alligators at bay, or some other metaphorical impossibility. As was our custom at the time, we agreed to withdraw from the day-to- day festivities to hold our annual off-site, or leadership, retreat to focus on the go-forward plan and make all things better. At some point during the day, we were discussing the state of affairs in our project portfolio. I am sure now that it was late in the day, as we knew this discussion could take a while, and we needed to make sure the bulk of the agenda was covered before embarking on the project discussion"--

Barry Cross’ career spans over 25 years of industry, teaching and consulting experience. He joined Queen’s University in 2006 after spending 18 years in various Executive and Management positions with Magna International, Autosystems Manufacturing and DuPont. While in Industry, Mr. Cross led many key strategic initiatives, including the development of significant projects in Asia, Brazil, Mexico, and Europe.

Mr. Cross now teaches at Queen’s School of Business at the Undergraduate and Graduate levels in Operations Management, Service Management, and Project Management. At the Executive level, he speaks regularly on Lean, Innovation, Execution, Operations and Project Management. His speaking and consulting clients include Deloitte, Samsung, Encana and others.

He has an MBA from Queen’s University and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Waterloo. He has published numerous articles and is quoted widely in radio, television and the written media. He is the bestselling author of Lean Innovation: Understanding What’s Next in Today’s Economy (Taylor and Francis, 2012).

Kathryn Brohman’s career started as a marketing manager with Sun Microsystems of Canada. She went on to pursue her Ph.D. in information systems at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario where she spent four years working with systems development teams both at the university as well as with organizations including Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and the Bank of Montreal.

Dr. Brohman is now an Associate professor at Queen’s School of Business. Her leading edge research focuses on enabling business strategy with technology with a specific focus on project governance and control and IT-enabled resilient organizational design. She has published her work in premier journals including the Decision Sciences, Harvard Business Review, MIS Quarterly Executive, and Communications of the ACM.

Kathryn’s primary teaching interests are strategy execution, project leadership, project management and IT-enabled service innovation. She regularly collaborates with organizations by providing assessment and coaching to improve organizational project management and leadership capabilities.

She has worked with a number of organizations on PMO design and enabling other formal mechanisms adaptive project control including Cargill, Empire Financial, Butterball Farms Inc., Access Copyright, and Queen’s University.