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Eating the elephant - be SMART

Eating the elephant – an analysis of project planning

Now, I’m not suggesting for an instant that anybody should eat elephant! When I was being trained on aspects of management, the tutor used this example to create maximum impact and memorability in our minds and imagination to apply to an everyday management issue.

Some projects are so huge a suitable metaphor would for a human to try to sit down and eat an elephant in one session. Clearly an alternative to this approach is necessary.

Major projects need to be broken down into manageable chunks. Some people use the idea of milestones; the idea being that you can track your progress to your target but remind yourself that each milestone is a SMART objective – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Eating an elephant in one go is neither realistic nor achievable so that milestone would not be SMART and would fail the test parameters.

Here’s an example from real life. We were manufacturing just over £16M worth of products per annum when a completely different type of customer approached us (we were a manufacturer) to help with advice about problems they were having with an intermediary they were buying from. We didn’t supply the intermediary and there was no chance we ever would due to their business strategy and our desire to be profitable! Anyway, back to the elephant. We weren’t sure what this out-of-the-ordinary, new potential customer was going to ask so as a whole senior management team we were standing by to answer any question about any business discipline.

As the meeting started we began to get a picture of the problems and why they were occurring. It was clear that their intermediary was trying to earn way too high a margin and consequently were not actually providing a value for money service. As our team knew each other well, we knew without words, as the meeting progressed, we were starting to think we could replace their intermediary. We asked how much this atypical customer spent per annum on our type of product – the answer stunned us: it was £28Mpa – almost double our annual turnover. Many teams would have shrunk away, overwhelmed by the scale of this jumbo opportunity. As it was, we could make a good guess at the average order size and decided it to be about £1000. Of our total customer base we had 700 intermediaries that were regular best customers (all good people). So the maths went like this - £28M annual turnover divided by £1000 per individual sale, gave us 28,000 sales per annum. Divide that by the 700 intermediaries we could involve to provide an excellent quality of service, then that came to 40 sales per annum or around 1 per week for each of our intermediaries. We did have capacity to put on another manufacturing shift. So between us, manufacturer and our intermediaries, we could easily eat the elephant on that basis.

We started a trial programme in a small geographical area, fine tuned the operation and over 2 years expanded our turnover in this diversification by £30M. Then we looked for other potential customers similar to this new diversification…………

If you have a project you need assistance with please don’t hesitate to contact me.