The ability of your team to outline the Top 3 market realities (insights, trends and feedback) that underpin, validate, inform and represent a risk to the project is the focus of completing the Market Realities panel on the one-page chassis tool.

Is your project sufficiently in tune with what is happening in the outside world?  Let’s find out, using the panel on the ‘project chassis’ one pager to explore the key external market realities (i.e. trends/insights/feedback) that:

• Make this project necessary or essential?
• Provide external validation for this initiative?
• Inform or shape this project/initiative?
• Represent uncertainty or risk for this project?

Test the extent to which your project is internally versus externally focused. 

Ask your project team to list the key obstacles or challenges facing the project. Then analyze the list to determine how many of the factors are internal (to the organization) versus external?  The ratio of internal to external factors is an indicator of where your project is focused. Chances are that factors such as internal bureaucracy, internal politics, managing internal stakeholders and so on will outweigh factors such as market competitiveness or changing customer needs.

The ability of your team to outline the Top 3 market realities (insights, trends and feedback) that underpin, validate, inform and represent a risk to the project is the focus of completing the Market Realities panel on the one page chassis tool.

However perhaps the greatest test of the extent to which a project is shaped by (or shaping) market reality is what the market (customers, channels, competitors, partners, etc.) are saying about it.  So, what are they saying?  How confident are we that we know what they are saying?