Notes From A Stress Fest

Kimberly Wiefling had an article on Projects@Work (www.projectsatwork.com) giving us a taste of some hard-learned lessons when dealing with project sponsors.

I’ve always loved Kimberly’s sense of humor and highly recommend just about anything she’s written. This is a great example of education a la entertainment. Check out her book too, I own it and can highly recommend it.
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Theoretical Frameworks in Project Management

I recently read an article on Project Connections, In Defense of the Project Management “Perfect World” by Carl Pritchard, PMP, EVP.

I thought it was an excellent article, with well-stated and supported points.

There are many theoretical frameworks for project management, quality, general management, etc. I’m convinced that above a particular threshold, all of them are nearly equally valid. Some may be better in specific areas than others, and some may apply better across a broad class of situations. Others just don’t work well in any scenario, and those die.
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Bringing LOE Activity into Portfolio Management

In an article at Projects@Work, Tom Mochal discusses how enhancement work not directly related to a project should be added to the managed portfolio. This way, the business can ensure that the dollars are being spent in the most effective way on these non-project activities.

I agree with what Tom is saying. A point I’d like to add is that value judgment is in the eye of the beholder, and incentives are different for a portfolio manager than they are for a developer or department. (more…)

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate!!!

Sorry, no direct correlation will be made to the Captain in Cool Hand Luke. Oh well, same topic (sorta). Project Management is 90% communication! How many times have we heard that one before?

I revisited a post titled “Silence — One of the Two Great Wastes™ — Is a Project and Career Killer” over at Reforming Project Management. I would like to do a short review and offer some thoughts on communication.
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Cutting to the Chase on Organizational Maturity

Jim Sloane is a particularly adept person to provide an executive primer on organizational project management maturity.  There are a multitude of models and approaches for measuring organization maturity and the associated business benefits.  With the increasing number of tools and models available to organizations, it can be challenging to choose the best strategy that will work for YOUR organization. (more…)

Building Ethically Healthy Organizations

Too often, compliance and ethics training is little more than a rather dull necessity to minimize a company’s likelihood of litigation, indictment, fines, and jail time.  It’s all about damage control and risk management.  Narrow, reactive, negative.  Author and educator David Gill says, “Ethics is not just (or primarily) about cataloging and ranting about the evil, unjust, and ugly.  Its historic focus is on the good, the just, and the excellent.  Ethics is about excellence.“

In his new book, It’s About Excellence: Building Ethically Healthy Organizations, business ethics consultant and educator David Gill argues that the damage control approach to ethics is partial at best, misguided at worst.  He builds a compelling case that corporate ethics should be a proactive, positive account of “how we operate our company in order to achieve our mission and vision with excellence.”  Treating all  stakeholders with fairness, respect, and good ethics is not just altruism but almost always a clear competitive advantage and a step toward business excellence.

Beyond concepts and good ideas, actual business examples and cases from the trenches provide evidence that (more…)

Innovation in Silicon Valley

One input I received while conducting focus groups and interviews about what managers want from the PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 is to hear about companies like Hewlett-Packard.  As an alumnus myself (22 years at HP), I appreciate the unique contributions established by Bill [Hewlett]and Dave [Packard].  I still remember the frankness and honesty of a presentation Chuck House made to executives from a major customer during their HP factory visit.  (more…)