Archive for January 2007

Back in history, pre-Internet days, I was in charge of developing a new IT system to support Marketing. While this was a Marketing system, the sponsor, my boss, was in Finance. And to complicate things, Sales provided the funding! And they wanted us to be fast…in less than three months! That’s without having requirements, mind [...]

This week we’ve covered two powerful tools to determine when trust is appropriate.
  
1. Invest time in getting to know people.  You’ll get valuable information that will inform your future interactions. Plus, you’ll be more familiar to each other, and more capable of collaborating effectively.  
 
2. Ask “Is trust appropriate here?” 
This way you can choose a smart [...]

Many years ago I was the manager for a large website when one day, the phone rang.
On the line was “John” the manager for a new product group within the company. Several weeks prior, a critical member of my team, “Roger”, had asked for formal permission to interview for a position on John’s team.
It was [...]

I once worked for a semiconductor company, in a business development role. I was new to the industry and so when “Doug” the test manager invited me for a tour of the test floor, I readily agreed.
We spent about an hour touring the facility, discussing the challenges of the test floor, and generally getting to [...]

So this guy goes to an all day workshop on trust. And in the supportive environment of the workshop, he sees that it’s safe to trust. Through the activities of the day, he learns to open up to others, to be vulnerable. After a full and satisfying day, he leaves the workshop feeling great. A [...]

This week I’m working with an R&D team in a company that makes bathroom fixtures. As I walked into their lobby I encountered a 4 foot diameter glass ball containing a toilet, one of their products. They also have a papier mache lighted toilet that was built for a festival right next [...]

Have you ever noticed that the topics raised at project post mortems tend to be pretty much the same every project? It’s deja vu all over again!  How many times can we “learn” that goals were unclear, or communication sucked, or late changes to the requirements caused quality issues in the shipping product, and on [...]

Can we design organizations the way we design products? Can we change their designs to make them more efficient/effective? These are questions my research partner and I endeavored to answer last year using Stanford’s Virtual Design Team software. Watch for our article in the March 2007 Project Management Journal.

Technorati Tags: project-management

I believe we need to rethink our views about failure. Truly, the only failure is if we fail to learn from each and every project, regardless of the outcome.

Technorati Tags: best-practices, common-sense, communication, failure, project-management, teamwork

Recently I realized that I have become a little cynical about project management. Maybe I’m just negative, and most projects really are smoothly running systems, with disaster showing it’s ugly face only very ocassionally. Perhaps my attitude is a consequence of my consulting in the area of product development project management (my dad [...]