Defining the Problem
More than six months into a project our project team found itself wondering whether we were really headed in the right direction. We thought we were doing well enough until a month ago when we compared notes with another team that was doing a similar project in another Province. We thought they were doing cool things like tackling the challenge (coordinating road investments) at the Provincial level – while we were doing the same thing at the Municipal level. And they were spending a lot of effort crafting a criteria for road investment prioritization while we accepted our Municipality’s road priorities (which we believed to be aligned with their respective strategic directions). These differences led us to thinking about whether the other team’s initiatives were applicable to us. Moreover we asked ourselves, “why didn’t we think of these things at all?” So we agreed to hunker down and sort these questions out. Nobody was quite sure where to begin, though. When my bo...