Let it simmer · Making project, portfolio and program management practices stick in a skeptical organization (the Simmer system)

Are you facing the challenge of getting your organization to adopt well-known business management practices? Maybe even practices that their own policies mandate ... but they don't actually do? Please don't assume because they hired you to do this that you can just start doing it. This is a big, big change.

Best practices are great … in the long-term; it's the initial approach that's often wrong. You can't cure a patient by administering an overdose. Right medicine, wrong treatment. Best practices are where you aspire to get, not where you start out. But how do you get organized enough to start thinking about best practices?

Welcome to Let It Simmer, a step-by-step guide to implementing governance practices using The Simmer System SM. Dr. Douglas Brown developed the system during 20-plus years as a PMO Director and as a consultant in both public and private sectors, helping organizations set these management disciplines up or get them back on track.

Introducing governance is a big change. People are always concerned about how change will impact them, and many senior managers see the arrival of management discipline as an attack on their freedom of action. The Simmer System shows you how to make this change happen with a minimum of conflict by helping your colleagues collaborate to help themselves, rather than attacking you for trying to make them do it.

Let It Simmer explains how to implement the components, illustrates them with numerous case studies, and provides practical exercises that show you how to implement the system in your own organization (or your client's). The components are:

• Four core principles of integration, transparency, integrity and purposeful service that will keep you on track when things get murky (and they will).

• Seven lists of data you can gather that set the stage for collaborative actions without sending up red flags.

• How to attain and keep top-level support, and what to do if you don't get it. This is the most essential task in determining the usefulness and staying power of your initiative (which in a process-averse organization is quite possible, at least at first).

• Eight collaborative activities to bring your peer managers into the governance world by solving their problems.

• How to identify the real decision-maker (i.e., a board or an individual), and how they can operate transparently without losing their autonomy.

This step-by-step guide provides you the opportunity to achieve a dramatic transformation that lasts — but without pushing so hard that the organization decides to get rid of it instead. In less time that you might expect, your fellow leaders will have started adopting sound management practices and your organization will be noticeably more cohesive, collaborative and productive. You'll be amazed at how much gets done once it's not all about you.

A word from Douglas Brown: People have asked, “What’s with that title, The Simmer System?” Tough meat needs to cook over low heat to soften gristle and melt the fat. Cook your food over very high heat and you’ll burn it. If the heat's too low, the food doesn't cook at all. I'm sharing the many lessons I’ve learned so you don't have to go through the aggravation of determining which correct “temperature” to use. I teach you how to simmer your programs, and end up with a well-run organization.

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