Niels Malotaux
Project Coach

Services

The basic service is to help:

• projects and organizations
• to be more predictable
• and more successful
• in shorter time
• with a huge economic value improvement

Who do we help?

• CIO: How to get a better grip on the organization
• Steering committee: How to get a better grip on a project
• Business manager: How to make the business function (even) better
• R&D manager: How to make the developers perform (even) better
• Portfolio manager: How to make sure that we select the right projects in the right order
• Program manager: How to optimize the coherence of all sub-projects
• Resource manager: How to optimize the use and efforts of the available people
• Project manager: How to guarantee a better project result in much shorter time
• Project teams: How to guarantee a better result in shorter time

We don't write reports full of recommendations. We rather provide pragmatic hands-on advice how to deal with issues and we actively assist with implementing solutions that work.
We actively help you to be more successful even faster.

We have a lot of experience and practices at our disposal, like, for example:

• Business and Project Coaching
  Football teams don't win an important match without a good coach. How about projects?
  It's not that the Project Manager and the people in the project don't know what they're doing. After all, they are the professionals. However, having coached well over 100 projects in over 25 organizations in 11 countries, we collected so much experience about improving the performance of projects, that any project can benefit. Within a few weeks of coaching (and not many days of my time!), projects typically produce better results in 30% less time. Unbelievable? That's what many people thought until they actually did it!
• Project Rescue
  Is a project going astray? We help to quickly put the project back on track and to keep it there (or kill the project, if that's a better option!).
• Project Startup
  During the "fuzzy front-end" of a project, many important decisions are made, which have a major impact on the duration and the success of the project. We can help you to focus on the important issues and to give your project a good and efficient start.
• Requirements
  Requirements are what the project is supposed to achieve. We'll provide Just in Time Training and help you to uncover the "real" Requirements, rather than a bulky document of so-called Requirements. Let's talk about your actual project and you'll see what I mean. Of course one of the first questions to ask is: "Why are we running this project at all?"
• Project Planning and Scheduling
  Evolutionary Project Planning and Scheduling consists of several elements to continuously optimize the efficiency of what we do, to check whether what we do is what is needed, and to quite accurately predict what will be done at a certain date, or when 'it' is done. We also will define what 'it' is.
• Program/Portfolio/Resource (PPR) Management
  If projects don't provide delivery dates we can rely on, PPR Management in practice is more like playing games: they play with fake data. Once projects, however, have learnt to promise what they can deliver and then deliver what they promised (normal people in projects learn this within a few weeks, on the project level this starts soon after), PPR Management becomes real management.
• Risk Management
  Everything we do is Risk Management. However, a lot of so-called project-risks are not really risks because they happen in every project. If we don't do the Right Things at the Right Time, there is a risk that the project won't be successful.
  See Booklet 4: Controlling Project Risk by Design (pdf, 604 kb).
• Reviews & Inspections
  Inspections are said to be one of the most economic ways to vastly improve the quality of our results. You can learn how to make Reviews and Inspections a lot more productive than you ever thought possible. It will show you a different way of looking at documents.
  Warning! You will very probably throw away the first document that is Inspected. This happens almost every time we start with Inspections. But don't despair: you will learn quickly to produce much better quality.
• Dependable Embedded Systems
  I have years of dependable embedded systems design experience and can help embedded systems development teams to avoid a lot of pitfalls.