In our 50th issue, we look at what happens under the Quay Bulletin hood.
One of the essential parts of the Quay Consulting ethos is the sharing of knowledge. Back in 2012, we took the plunge into producing the Quay Bulletin, a collection of articles that shares our insights, knowledge and point of view on project management and delivery, and this month marks our 50th Edition.
It’s a landmark moment for us. For the past four years, we’ve traversed many topics and opinions about the landscape that is project management. Not everyone agrees with us and that is okay. Project management and its related disciplines are not linear; there will always be differences of opinion, which can be a catalyst for the type of healthy debate that can drive the industry forward and create positive change.
So as we celebrate our 50th, we want to pop the bonnet and illuminate how we go about developing our monthly bulletin and some of the highlights along the way.
It’s About Your Experiences
We select topics for the Quay bulletin in a not-so-scientific way, perhaps a mix of science with a dash of art. Our articles are developed based on what we and our consultants are seeing and experience in the market at a point in time.
Each month, we sit down to understand how what we see is impacting our clients, what the key challenges are (both new and old) and where we think we can add value by offering insights on how to help them do better.
If you’ve been a long-time subscriber (and many have been), you’ll notice that our bulletins have recurring themes from time-to-time: Agile adoption, governance, sponsor uplift or workforce management, to name a few.
We revisit the issues when we see clients face similar challenges again and again, and as the project management space evolves, those challenges shift in shape as well. In many cases, the challenges are as relevant at issue 50 as they were at issue 1.
It’s Not Always the Textbook View
We are not purists, though there are some in the industry that are. The Quay Bulletin has rarely taken the textbook point of view because our insights and ideas come from the interaction that occurs between our clients and our consultants as we go through the process of addressing project delivery challenges.
There are times when our view won’t align with the textbook. That is by design. We’ve accumulated enough scars by being in the thick of delivering change. We’ve seen from the frontline, the helicopter view and the outcomes that each client is different and applying a ‘standard textbook’ approach doesn’t always work.
Agile is, perhaps, the best example of this. There is the purist approach and then there is the pragmatic approach. We stand firmly in the pragmatist’s camp. That said, we do have respect for the textbook way of doing things; we just understand the limitations.
A good case in point is PMBOK, which has been the gold standard of sound project delivery for many years. It was only in recent years that Stakeholder Management has been recognised as worthy of its own knowledge area that indicates to us that the purist approach has its challenges. For Quay, Stakeholder Management is the must-have skill above all others.
What are You Interested in?
Like any good content development strategy, we keep a pretty close eye on the gauges that tell us what you’re interested in. We delve into the data to see what is keeping our subscribers interested and engaged.
Without fail, Agile is a strong topic. We see it in social media too, particularly how Agile can be adopted to deliver better projects. We also pay attention when we get a strong response to the niche project topics we write about, such as Workforce Management (WFM).
The Standouts
However, whilst Agile and WFM always draw strong readership, we’ve had a few standouts from the 140-odd articles we’ve produced, none more so than one article that stands out by the proverbial country mile: our view on the exaggerated death of the ERP.
It is an article that continues to draw in readers from not just Australia, but around the world. We knew we’d hit the big time when one our eagle eye team discovered that it had not only appeared on another site, but had in fact been translated into Japanese (thank you Google Translate!).
While we wouldn’t encourage the pilfering of content, it’s oddly flattering. And who doesn’t want to be big in Japan?
Thanks for your continued support and readership of the Quay Bulletin, and here’s to the next 50.
Want to find out more about Quay Bulletin? Sign up below or follow @quayconsulting on Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook.