Creating the Project Office - Part Two - making change happen

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 of the organization are not the “enemy” in the classic sense, but they can be expected to respond in ways that are perhaps not expected, not planned, or not even imagined.

Here are some observations: (more…)

Creating the Project Office - Part One - cautionary tale

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 time is akin to the preparation of a project plan.

Some will say the planning is a waste of time.  Some may press for quick results and eschew the entire planning idea.  Others may agitate to quicken the process and get to action sooner.  But project and program managers know better.  They know that planning is essential.  For those who insist on skipping this first phase and taking a shortcut, here is a cautionary tale: (more…)

The 6 Emotional-Basket-Case Thinking Hats

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, Edward de Bono created a straight-forward and elegant tool called the Six Thinking Hats®. Each hat is a different color and invites the thinker to adopt a different point of view. Wearing the various hats enables us to break out of a rut and view a situation from a number of perspectives. Here’s how it works. You take on each hat’s perspective try like heck to think about the situation from that perspective instead of your normal bias. While the Six Thinking Hats® tool works astonishingly well as designed, during the intensity and mood swings of a recent project I began to contrive an alternative version for dealing with human emotion. Let me know what you think. (more…)

Lesson Learned, but…

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? (more…)

What’s Your Greatest Project Challenge?

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 in your projects? mdt

Agile Phases

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), describes the following phases: (more…)