Archive for September 2007

All aboard? It’s the last day of the worldwide tour and you’re ready to put your passport to use. Yes, it’s time to launch your global project and head for the airport. In order to ensure a smooth launch, you will need to maximize awareness, interest, and participation from your team members around the world. [...]

It’s a global initiative just waiting to happen. You’ve got the plan and you’re ready to go. But where’s the team? How are you going to recruit, dazzle, and motivate your international team members? All of a sudden, you may find yourself spinning circles around the globe. Don’t get lost in foreign territory. Get your [...]

Uno, dos, tres: are you ready for take-off? In order to get a running start for fall and the coming year, take the opportunity to evaluate your global launch timeline. The global launch plan provides a clear vision and road map to facilitate execution by cross-functional and cross-regional teams. The creation of the global [...]

Parlez-vous le project management? A cross-cultural perspective and local market understanding is always needed when delivering effective project management solutions. There are many cultural communication mistakes that have been made by well-intentioned global strategists who assumed similarity rather than difference. In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” was [...]

It’s time to go global. With ticket and passport in hand, you’re ready to evangelize the world about your mission. The global launch project has been approved and your team is onboard. There’s just one challenge: you only have one strategy for multiple countries. The regions are following different travel plans, communication and teamwork is [...]

Yesterday I spent 2 hours walking solemnly through the Peace Memorial and Park in Hiroshima, Japan. This was a somber experience for me. At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, in an instant a thriving city was reduced to rubble and throngs of injured people – some screaming for help and others praying for [...]

In today’s fast-moving economy, success depends on embracing the future rather than repeating the past – taking time to extract lessons from project experience positions us as learners rather than followers.

Technorati Tags: agile, Retrospectives

Do you have the opportunity to learn while you work, to take a look at your project experiences for lessons learned?   Is the idea of learning from experience just another thing that’s fallen into the “knowing-doing gap”?  The mature organization encourages and capitalizes on learnings as the starting place for refinements and new initiatives.  How [...]

We have all been on projects where an understanding different stakeholder groups becomes a ‘touchy-feely’ process.  You have a gut feel for their tolerance for change, commitment, ability to influence and what they view as important.  Most of the time we are wrong but if we had some real data for these areas, then we could [...]

In part 1 of this blog, we talked about not all communication events were pushed out to the project stakeholders.  Let’s look at some different types of communications interventions that represent the information, ideas, topics and subject matter that flow to and from the stakeholders through formal communication channels.

Technorati Tags: communication

The PMI Silicon Valley Maturity Forum 2007 is now history…at least for the event but not in the mindset of participants.  Here is my recap from this important event:
My keynote message covered WHAT, HOW, and WHO need to address project maturity in their organizations.  WHAT is the ten pieces of the puzzle to create an [...]

Many of you have heard the old adage of “Communicate: Communicate: Communicate” as a preamble by a Project Manager at a project kickoff meeting?  You sit there and try to see the significance of this statement and your role in the project.  But the project manager sounded so sincere and purposeful when he/she [...]

  Brad Clark shares another Q&A session based on a Maturity Forum participant’s question:
Q:  “Our company is growing very fast and we need to get our process to the next level of maturity to support an enterprise company – can you provide some guidance to help us manage this?”

  Continuing on this week’s theme of Project Management Maturity, here is a piece provided by Larry Bull, PMI Manager, OPM3® Products and Services:
What is the measure of a successful project?  In days of old, the standard answer to this question was usually “on scope, on time and on budget” or some derivation of the tried and true [...]

   Ahead of Friday’s Project Management Maturity Forum, guest speaker Brad Clark shares answers on a few advance questions from our participants.  Brad is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Advantinum Group, an Ohio-based management consulting firm, and is Maturity Measurement Team Lead for OPM3® Second Edition.
Q:  ”How do you achieve project management maturity when project teams are virtual, using many [...]

   Continuing on thoughts around maturity and the evolution of project management…the PMI-Silicon Valley Chapter is hosting their 10th Anniversary Dinner next month, and joining the festivities will be Stanford Advanced Project Management’s Dr Christopher Meyer to share his insight on how the future of project management will play a role in delivering a good customer experience.  Chapter President Harish Chinai and I recently had a conversation on [...]

Creating Excellence in/through Project Management means optimizing and achieving greater results from project-based work: realizing a competitive advantage by executing strategy through projects: significant advancements in maturity of people, processes, and the environment of a project-based organization.  It involves forming a picture of an ideal environment for implementing projects: and requires an honest assessment of [...]

  With two major milestones underway at the PMI-Silicon Valley Chapter, this week seemed like a good time to take stock and share thoughts along the theme of “Project Management Evolution.”  Joining me in blogging this week will be Harish Chinai, Chapter President, and Larry Bull, PMI’s Director of OPM3® product and services.
I left my Silicon [...]

If you ever watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the one thing you learned for sure was to never, ever, vote against the audience when you used your “ask the audience” lifeline. Why, because 91% of the time, they were right! That blew away the accuracy record of “asking a friend”, [...]

 Brilliant adolescence is not a recipe for continued success in Silicon Valley, although it has been largely responsible for a great deal of momentum to date.
To address this concern in your organization, invite your sponsor to invigorate your organization at the Project Management Institute (PMI) Silicon Valley Maturity Forum 2007 Projects Programs and Portfolios in [...]

For anyone who is might be in the habit of drinking soda near their computer, maybe the word “sticky” strikes terror into your heart, but if you are a project manager wanting to get buy-in for your project or product, Chip and Dan Heath provide you with some powerful tools in Made To Stick

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