Now that you're working from a bit of a more integrated system is based perspective for the foundation of all of your projects, let's explore the seven essentials, these seven essentials will significantly increase the likelihood that all of your projects are going to be dramatically more successful. Here's the first one of the seven. I don't think there's anyone that is as important as this first one. And what we're talking about here is at the end of the day, who needs to act as an owner, or the owners of all the projects, and of course, that's the senior team. Now, there's any number of reasons for this, my hope is that you've had the experience of working in an organization where this is the case, because there's an extraordinary difference when the senior executives are truly showing up as owners of all the projects, rather than in sourcing that responsibility to either project teams or group of directors or whoever it might be.

So why is this so critical? There's a number of key points here. First of all, who has the authority to allocate money for this project? Now, if it's a $10,000 project that may well be anybody in the line of authority in your organization. But if it's $100,000 project, or it's a $5 million project, that's a different thing. So where does the budget come from who has the authority to sign off the budget requirements to fund the project?

The bigger the project, of course, the higher that authority needs to be. So I can imagine here is who can hold the organization as a whole accountable for the results that are required. Now, the first level supervisors are responsible for holding their people at the local work area accountable for the results, but who holds the supervisors accountable? Well, hopefully the managers Well, who holds the managers accountable, and you can see where this goes. At the end of the day, that accountability has got to be demonstrated clearly, from the very top of the organization, accountability for the results of successful projects. One of the challenges that often happens in busy organizations with lots and lots of projects, there's endless meetings.

And project teams often call meetings and are perplexed as to why no one shows up or not the right people show up or very few of the right people show up. Well, this is again, why it's so critical for the senior executives act as owners, people with a significant amount of perceived power or real power in your organization can call meetings and because they're calling the meeting and because they're going to be at the meeting, people recognize this is serious. I've got to show up. One of the challenges as we'll see when it comes to effective project teams is having the result forces who can provide the resources, who removes the roadblocks from ensuring that the resources are available for the project teams to use? When we think about all of the projects that are underway, who can act as coordinator for all these project teams?

The answer to all of these questions is essentially, the senior team, individually and collectively, they really must be seen and they must act and fulfill our obligation as owners of all the projects. So what can you do? Now, if you're a senior executive, you can actually start to show up as an owner. But if you're not a senior executive, how might you influence the senior executives? How might you in some way, shape or form increase the likelihood that they fulfill that obligation for owning all the projects in your organization? So that's the question find this worksheet.

Make a note to yourself. If you're with a group of people answer this question in a conversation and make some notes collectively some things that we could do.