Archive for August 2007

Managing outsourced work: can that project be saved?
An experienced, well-trained project manager is not enough to guarantee an outsourced development success. It also takes a reliable, trustworthy, competent supplier. Even if the best project management techniques were used to choose a supplier, circumstances can change, turning a reliable supplier into an unreliable one. Some circumstances [...]

Managing outsourced work
Now that you’ve made your decision, picked a supplier, and written a contract, just kick back and let them do the work and deliver a final product. After all, they won’t fail because they promised they wouldn’t. And besides, you won’t pay them any more than they bid.
Not so fast.

Technorati Tags: best-practices, change-management, [...]

A few more things to do before making the outsourcing decision:
3. Create a Request for Proposal (RFP) that describes, in great detail, the software you want a supplier to create (the software requirements), anything else you want them to deliver (documentation, testing results), the testing they must do, the processes and tools you expect them [...]

A company that has its own software development capability is driven to outsource software development in an attempt to save money or reduce costs. The company’s management may say they’re doing it because they can’t find enough qualified staff locally (or quickly), or so they won’t have to build up an additional development facility, or [...]

I was recently showing this blog site to a friend. As he looked through it, he nodded and mumbled some (did it just seem to me a bit reluctant and slightly envious?) approvals. Then, he looked up and blurted, “Hey, what’s this art thing?” He was talking about the tag line: “The [...]

I’m looking for some insight from all of you on a point that’s been bothering me lately. On many recent projects, “time to market” has been defined, and rightly so, as the top priority (I still use the triple constraints as a key organizing/prioritization guide). Given the competitive pressures and the related shortened [...]

In the grand tradition of analytical thinking, the answer I start with is, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
On the Yes side, there are a lot of “things” a good project manager needs to know and know how to do. There are the technical skills that can be taught – what might be referred to as [...]

A German colleague once commented (during a lager-filled post-project celebration) about how different German and US project management looked to her. She said, “We often wonder in Germany how you Americans successfully got to the moon.” As the Germans nodded, the Americans (being so articulate in our own language) retorted, “Whaaaat?”
Basically, she saw American managers [...]

Risk management has always been tricky. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine the myriad ways in which something could go wrong until it goes wrong. While being a pessimist helps, even staunchly negative thinkers can sometimes be surprised by the smorgasboard of disasters the life serve up. I recently experienced a triple decker [...]

Today I wanted to tackle how project managers and their approach to that role can be seen as boon to teamwork: or conversely be one major reason the team does not work together well.  In my experience project management is often viewed by team members not as an enabler, but as some separate and materially [...]

One of the things I’ve tried to do in this series is use some “word pictures”: ways of describing things that  hopefully bring an idea or  behavior to life so that it’s easier to apply in the real world.  I love the phrase “victim or vanquisher?” because it evokes for me VERY clear pictures of [...]

A friend once emailed me with a burning question about “A Situation” with a particular team member. What had started out as some displays of mild to medium recalcitrance – the team member resisting some advice in preparing for a design review, then being pointedly late on a couple of key deliverables – had spread [...]

My first two posts in this teamwork rumination (last week’s post here and yesterdays “part 2″ here)  set up the idea that “great teamwork” really comes from  proactive, high-quality contributions of individual team members.  In this post I want to relay a few  thoughts about what team member attitudes are behind such contributions, and additional examples of [...]

In a post last week I talked about “teamwork” not being a warm and fuzzy concept to me.   To me the concept of teamwork has meaning due only to a result a group of people produces due to their work together.   A well-functioning team that exhibits “good teamwork” is made up of individuals each taking personal responsibility for having an impact [...]

Welcome back to blog # 5 in the series. Today, for project management, we are going to look at a very specific case of an on-campus project and how I managed it into an A+. Of course, I had a vision, a mission and purpose, goals, plans and pilot programs and I had [...]

Welcome back everyone to blog # 4: your opportunity to look in the mirror to see what you see about having you lead, or work on, any project: and you had better see a leader or else you are going to see a follower and if you are follower, then you may be the one [...]

 Welcome back, everyone for blog # 3: the fresh and refreshing perspective series.  If you have expectations and assumptions about finding something serious here, such a re-engineering and all that other good consultant stuff, this is NOT the place for you.  If you want to find out how we DID IT and won ALL of [...]

 
Welcome back, everyone.  I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s overview. Were you in a snit and snot, dance and prance, rant and rave, hoot and holler or scream and yell of your own yesterday?  If not, maybe today is your lucky day: these things are experien-tial, you know.  And, did you go out and buy Stephen [...]

                                                              
Project Management:
New Perspectives From The Second Grade Playground To Make Your Job Easier.

 
Project management has got to be the easiest task on God’s green Earth.  Yes? No? Maybe so.  Have you not discovered this to be the truth as we all know it?
 
Hello everyone, I’m Dave Katz: the most obnoxious math tutor that my school [...]

“The concept of teamwork often gets turned into some fluffy, warm and fuzzy ‘thing’ that no one quite knows what to do with … a bunch of people working together in unadulterated harmony or even outright bliss. Great if you can get it but not something I’ve seen a huge amount of….”

Michael Hammer, in his initial article on re-engineering, evaluated how work has been organized throughout the past half century. He stated that in the postwar period, entry-level people with basic skills were easy to come by, but experienced professionals were not. As a result, businesses pulled apart work into small, repeatable tasks, and focused information [...]