Ainsley Nies - UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley

So.  It’s the end of the week and I’ve shown you mine, now let’s take a look at yours!   Is your toolbox a treasure chest full of bright, shiny, valuable tools or is it more like Pandora’s Box, full of unreliable, outdated, more-trouble-than-they’re-worth tools?   Lowe’s Home Improvement has some good advice on the question: “If [...]

 I see no point in reinventing the wheel: I prefer to accessorize!  So to make the most of what I’ve learned already, I keep a basic set of templates and checklists in the toolbox, along with the inevitable expectation that they’re a starting point for adaptation and customization. 

The second tray of my toolbox has two compartments, one for key components of various project management methodologies/ approaches, and one for facilitation exercises.  The number of variables per project ensures that every project will be unique: a standard methodology does nothing to change this, though most do their best to control them (control change? [...]

 The top tray of my project management toolbox has three compartments which hold my Chimes, Linked Lists and Open Channel.  Tibetan chimes (tingshas) are prayer chimes traditionally used to focus and clear the mind before and after a teaching or meditation.  I use them a bit differently as a way to attract people’s attention without having [...]

The first thing I see when I open my toolbox is the inside of the lid, so here’s where I post reminders of the things that will have the most overall effect on my work: my project management principles and mantra.  The project management principles define how my values are implemented on the job.  I [...]

I’ve been talking to folks lately about their favorite project management tools: the essential ones that they just can’t do without.  I expected much of what I heard and was surprised and delighted with the unexpected – like “my sense of humor”.  It got me to thinking seriously about the tools I rely on most [...]

I just finished reviewing the notes from last week’s Agile Open California conference retrospective: what an amazing journey!  One of the many interesting discoveries was the fact that it was almost exactly 9 months from conception of the conference to delivery: some cycle times just can’t be improved on!

What’s the most important thing you do that makes you a good project manager?  The only contest I ever won was answering that question. 

How can you stay positive in your approach to project management work when you need to spend so much of your time on what has gone wrong, is going wrong or might go wrong?   The PMBOK®, for example, has 11 Monitoring and Control processes, as well as the whole Risk Management Knowledge Area to keep you [...]

Here’s one of those really good (and at the same time really irritating) questions to ask yourself – why is it that I know so much more than I actually do when I want to be successful at something?  This time of year always reminds me that even though I know the plan for just [...]

Why are questions so powerful?  Because the beginnings of change are in the questions we ask, and the best thing we can ask is often “What is the question I should be asking?”

Am I weird or what?  The way I lead my life and my project management practices are so intertwined that it’s sometimes hard to tell whose legs I’m dancing on!   Cross-pollination of work and life outside of work (different from work-life balance) is a fact: are you leveraging it or letting it leverage you?

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.

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 [...]