Archive for February 2007

Hello Everyone – I am scheduled to blog next week and thought I’d start by asking a few questions.  Shall I write about:

Building Trust in Distant Teams
Some “diplomacy tips” managing people from other parts of the world?
Communication in Meetings – with people with diverse backgrounds?
Managing mixed ages, genders, styles, cultures, etc.?
Increasing quality, consistency, and timeliness [...]

Having been told my whole life that sometimes I can be a bit too intense, it was enormously liberating to finally find an environment where I blended right in: a drum circle of more than 50 passionate lunatics banging away like they were being paid by the decibel. These were not people in search of [...]

The payment is project failure.  The investment is effective project sponsorship.  Successful project managers invest in managing their sponsors: they avoid becoming victim to bad situations by proactively eliciting the support they need.
Examples abound about how project managers manage upwards. 

Technorati Tags: action, building-executive-support, communication, Leadership, project-management, project-sponsorship, sponsor

Many executives are assigned as project sponsors, but their organizations do not spend time training and explaining their expected roles and responsibilities during project life cycles.   The accidental project manager role is well known, and the same applies to sponsors.
The sponsor role can have a tremendous impact on project success.  However, reality is quite different. [...]

I often present the ten pieces of a puzzle that comprise an environment for successful projects.  The pieces, however, will not stay together without glue. The glue has two vital ingredients:  authenticity and integrity.  Authenticity means that managers really mean what they say.  Integrity means that they really do what they say they will do, [...]

Part One of Creating the Project Office is creating the conditions for change; Part Two is making the change; Part Three is making change stick.  Our greatest challenge in putting the concepts into action is to rewrite the myth of Sisyphus.  Greek gods condemned Sisyphus to keep rolling a rock to the top of a [...]

Part One is creating the conditions for change; Part Two is making the change. We are now ready to enter the final phase of the journey, the toughest part: making change stick.  If the change agent team has made it this far, some amount of time has elapsed.  The project office has no doubt changed [...]

Part One creates conditions so that change could happen.  In Part Two, change the emphasis from planning to doing.  Now is the time to make contact with those people in the organization who must actually carry out the planned changes.  A military dictum asserts “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”  The members [...]

Creating a project office may be the “in thing” to do.  It is also fraught with perils.  A goal may be to implement a project office as a vehicle for organizational change.  The first step, then, is to discover the processes necessary to lead organizational change and create the conditions that will enable change.  This [...]

The most challenging aspect of being a project manager is dealing with (mostly) humans. They’re emotional, unpredictable and down right irrational at times! (Not me, of course . . . the OTHERS!) Out of what appears to be intense frustration with the whack-a-mole fashion in which humans approach creative thinking and problem-solving, [...]

I loved Kimberly’s blog entry of Jan 14.  Why do we keep making the same mistakes on every project?  Why is it that we can write the “lessons learned” even before the project has begun?

Technorati Tags: Lessons Learned, project-management, real-world, Risk

Many of my project management students have indicated that most of their project crises can be traced back to the project’s initial definition. Others believe that most of their project problems stem from poor risk management, role confusion, and scope management. From your experience, what one single underlying cause has created the most difficult challenge [...]

Earlier this week I described my experience with Agile in pre-history (pre-Internet days). As I’m engaging again in SW development, I’ve been looking into how I would organize an Agile project if I had to come up with a methodology.
Jim Highsmith, in his book “Agile Project Management” (same book I mentioned in my prior post), [...]