How Many Years Does It Take To Turn On A Lightbulb?

The Flintstones approach to digital project management offers a more effective and efficient method for defining objectives, allocating responsibilities, and achieving successful outcomes. By empowering tech teams to refine project goals and design solutions, this approach addresses many of the shortcomings inherent in traditional project management practices.

As I've mentioned previously, Flintstones pilots are an alternative approach to justifying the funding for, and governing, digital projects. It wasn't until I began using Flintstones as my primary transformation approach in 2002 that I realised how silly some of our traditional practices are.

Let's look at the traditional responsibilities of sponsors, users and the tech team and compare them to a healthier dynamic that emerges naturally from a Flinstones-centric approach.

In theory, the goals of any tech project are defined by the sponsor. But sponsors are busy business people who receive no training in what makes a good objective versus what makes a bad objective. So in practice, I've found that most business cases have such a poorly stated objective as to be rendered useless.

This was always my starting point, even in traditional project rescues. I would ask for a copy of the business case, knowing that I would read the whole document and still be none the wiser as to a measurable outcome that we were expected to achieve with the project. It's no wonder that so many IT projects fail.

In a Flintstones project, tech teams have been pre-trained in the difference between a well-stated and a poorly stated objective. They've been trained to understand that the team must have only one objective, where in traditional projects it's easy to have multiple and almost always conflicting objectives. So the first service that the tech team offers the business community is to help them better state their objective.

This sounds like a minor thing, but it is definitely not. A concise and well-stated objective almost always leads to a successful project, in my experience. And on the flipside, poorly stated objectives always lead to failure.