The Seven Keys to Success™
October 2002
Bringing Project Management to
the boardroom
by Bill Smillie
Partner
Bringing Project Management to the boardroom
Page 2
The Seven Keys to Success™
How important is project management? The question is becoming increasingly
relevant, as many companies are coming to realize that it takes more than
innovations and technologies to come of age in a digital economy.
A lot more, say the program and project management advisors at IBM Business
Consulting Services. Certain that the future of today’s companies depend on
successful project management, the firm has introduced a new framework and
service offering that applies science to the art of project management.
Called the Seven Keys to Success, these services are applicable for either a
single, stand-alone project, or a comprehensive program. Seven Keys to Success
was developed after analyzing thousands of projects that differed widely in size,
type and geography. The resulting framework offers something previously
unavailable to the business community: a formalized way of comparing ‘lessons
learned’ across a wide population of projects, providing insight into what has
happened to projects like yours when the wrong decision—or no decision—was
made.
Providing a formal framework, Seven Keys to Success has the potential to
become a new universal yardstick for measuring project health. IBM Business
Consulting Services’ experience has shown that seven key result areas make the
difference between success and failure on any project. Between the key result
areas it addresses and the supporting Seven Keys management dashboard, Seven
Keys to Success provides the framework necessary to succeed in your strategic
initiatives. It can help companies identify the warning signs that a project is
veering off course and implement measures that will put it back on track,
communicate project status to executives in a way that leads to decisions and
actions that mark the difference between success and failure, and even help to
win executive commitment a