Consultant-in-a-Box®

The traditional project approach is failing. Our proven framework empowers your business teams to drive successful technology implementations (including AI), increase ROI, and achieve superior business capabilities.

Many organizations approach projects with flawed thinking and methods, leading to failures or poor ROI that have plagued businesses for decades.

Driving Technology ROI Through Business Mastery

The problem is clear: Project failures and underperforming technology investments are costing organizations over $1 trillion annually, with some estimates reaching $6 trillion (Source: Industry Analysts). The same conventional methods lead to the same unacceptable results.

We believe the solution lies not in more complex IT processes, but in empowering business leadership and teams to own and influence the complete business and technology lifecycles.

Consultant-in-a-Box® delivers the know-how and disciplines to unlock the full potential and creativity of your business teams, leading to significantly higher ROI from technology projects and a sustainable competitive advantage.

It's More Than About Projects

As I delved into industry studies and research on why so many projects fail or become troubled, and reflected on the thousands of projects and assignments I've engaged in, I realized that a root cause might be the concept of "the project" itself.

Traditional thinking assesses a project's internal workings and execution to determine why it failed or did not achieve its full objective. However, what happens, or doesn't happen, before and after a project is equally, or even more crucial, to its success.

Many projects are doomed to failure before they even begin due to poor setup and initiation processes, or a lack thereof. Some even fail after completion due to poor organizational adoption.

Executive Value Proposition: What You Gain

By adopting our approach, your organization will achieve four critical executive outcomes:

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Maximize Capability and Project ROI: Shift from mere project thinking to Capability Thinking® to ensure technology investments continually increase business performance and value.
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Achieve Consistent Success: Elevate your project success rates above the industry average of 30% by educating, engaging, and increasing the business team's influence across the full investment and project lifecycle. Quality business-IT engagement can increase IT performance by up to 54% (Source: Gartner, on effective IT-Business engagement).
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Optimize Vendor Software Selection Decisions: Reduce costly surprises and save significant overhead, including management consulting fees, by empowering business teams to evaluate and make preliminary vendor decisionsin less than 24 hours.
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Improve Deliverable Quality: Ensure project outputs align with business needs to accelerate the realization of benefits and reduce post-implementation rework.

🎯 Our Core Solution: Business-Centric Mastery

We provide the definitive toolkit for business leaders to take control of their technology destiny. This isn't an IT methodology; it’s business disciplines that wrap around your existing project execution processes, focusing on pre-project setup and initiation post-project adoption.

Our framework is built on Five Business Masteries and powerful, action-oriented Checklists, Deliverable Maps, and a Master Curriculum (Masteries).

The 5 Business Masteries for Leadership

These masteries provide the strategic lens and behavioral shifts needed for business and project success:

Engage System™: Realize that success requires understanding and influencing the "System" (e.g., culture, institutional imperatives, industries and markets, internal and external ecosystems) you are operating within before, during, and after a project. Continually engaging front-line business operators before, during, and after projects is the primary method to achieve this understanding. Also realize that projects are sociological endeavors, not technical ones.
Develop Insight™: Learn from history. Many failures are caused by organizational dysfunction. Our approach includes actions to develop insight into common pitfalls and failure enablers before projects begin, so that safeguards and methods are built into the project to increase its probability for success.
Embrace Mission™: Define a clear, concise purpose for every project, linking business capability outcomes directly back to your financial statements (P&L, Balance Sheet) and organizational competencies.
Optimize Decisions™: Streamline vendor software evaluation. Move away from time-consuming, ineffective RFPs to an agile, dialogue-based process (JITDE™) focused on vital needs and vendor partnering.
Think Capability™: Capability Thinking® is the fundamental shift that enables the previous four masteries. Treat technology investments as an ongoing, evolving business capability—not a finite project. Embed Capability Thinking® disciplines as guardrails, keeping initiatives within a "cone of success certainty."

🛠 Actionable Tools: Checklists, Deliverables, Assessments, Curricula

Our Checklists, Deliverable Maps, and curriculums translate these masteries into structured, non-technical actions:

Tool	Strategic Purpose	Key Benefit for Executives
Master Checklist	Guides non-technical business teams through the complete project investment lifecycle (Pre-Project Setup, project Execution, Post-Project Adoption).	Ensures crucial due diligence and critical decisions occur earlier in the investment process, minimizing costly late-stage surprises.
Vendor Software Optimization Checklist	Focuses on using an enhanced RFP-based vendor selection process or on JITDE™, an accelerated, due diligence, and partnering approach.	Empowers business ownership of the selection process, guaranteeing solutions align with future business capabilities.
Deliverable Maps	Provides clear, interactive guides for creating high-quality project and capability outputs.	Increases quality and content clarity, ensuring deliverables consume minimum scarce resources (people, time, CAPEX/OPEX).
Project Assessments	Provides a no BS project assessment in under 2 minutes. Use our Executive Dashboard of Risk and our MISSION™ Stress Test.	Quickly identifies watermelon projects so you can take decisive action to kill them or perform surgery to repair them.
Master Curriculum (Masteries)	Courses and guides designed to educate business executives and teams on crucial project competencies.	Enhances the influence and engagement intensity of business teams on technology projects, resulting in higher and sustained ROI.
Readiness Assessment	Validates the business team's readiness to successfully engage in technology projects.	Identify gaps in understanding to target instruction. This approach shifts the focus from simply covering material to addressing specific learning needs, making the educational process more efficient and effective.

📊 The Cost of Inaction: Why This Matters Now

Technology, including AI, investments are more likely to fail or be troubled than to succeed. Continued conventional thinking allows these failures to persist:

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Failure Rate: Approximately 70% of projects either fail, are significantly troubled (miss budget/schedule by more than 10%), or underdeliver benefits.
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Financial Impact: The annual global cost of failed projects collectively exceeds $1 trillion, with some estimates as high as $6 trillion.
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The Law of Complexity: Increasing application functionality by 25% doubles its complexity (Glass's Law). Our focus on vital needs and agile releases is the antidote to this.
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Time is the Scarcest Resource: Unlike capital, time cannot be replenished. Our focus on acceleration and minimizing knowledge transitions is designed to protect your most valuable asset.

By shifting ownership, engagement, and know-how to your business teams and elevating your organization's pre-and post-project thinking and practices, you can reverse these trends and achieve a clear, quantifiable return on your technology portfolio.