Randall Englund

With many thanks to Carrie Underwood for singing this beautiful song, it seems fitting during this holiday season to reflect upon the lyrics and apply them to our world of project management:
What you got if you ain’t got love
the kind that you just want to give away
It’s okay to open up
go ahead and let the [...]

What do Sisyphus, Attila the Hun, the Quakers, and early cartographers have in common with creating a project office?
They all represent metaphors that guide modern managers to implement a project office for organizational change.  You may decide to become a POO–a Project Office of One, or your organization may need a SPO–a Strategic Project Office.
Find [...]

Political issues often thwart rapid advancement.  Organizations by their very nature are political.  How can you identify and characterize stakeholder traits that need to be addressed or accommodated if, as a leader, you wish to exercise influence and be more effective within an organization?
One way to help turn potential victim scenarios into win-win political victories [...]

The results delivered by projects depend upon what you negotiate.  A “secret” employed by successful project leaders is that they explore a perspective, principles, tools, and recommendations to achieve better results through the power of negotiations. They avoid being set up for failure by recognizing and developing skills that lead to greater success.
Every day involves [...]

Are you having fun yet?  I have recently been moderating a discussion about management, leadership, and team building in a project and program environment.  Let me share a few of the comments recorded so far.  On the topic of what makes for project success—is fulfilling the triple constraints enough?—I provided a high level summary view [...]

Participants in the UCSC Extension advanced course on the “Project Management Office” had ample opportunity to explore their environmental challenges, share questions with others, and prepare action plans on implementing a project office for organizational change.  They came with real questions and left with renewed understandings about the potential for anything from a Project Office [...]

One critical choice project managers face is between control and results.  Managers say they want results but actions speak even louder to say they want control.  Do onerous controls inhibit achieving the very results they were intended to produce?  Is control an illusion?   Is it possible for managers to pursue both control and results: up [...]

Phil Messina, a project manager at HP, volunteered to document the PMI Norcal Symposium 2008. Here is his report.
Randy Englund, Content and Program Director, www.englundpmc.com

On September 3rd and 4th, nearly 300 project management professionals settled into the Stanford University Faculty Club meeting room in Palo Alto, California, for the NorCal 2008 PMI Symposium. [...]

In the PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 just concluded at Stanford University, Esteri Hinman, a Capability Owner at Intel’s Corporate Platform Office, included a fabulous letter to executives in her presentation.  The letter is too good–and relevant–to go unnoticed, so here it is.  Please feel free to pass it along to others who need it.

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Q:  I am an architect in an architectural firm with the title of project manager.  I can only assume that the “sponsor” would be my immediate supervisor/boss who is to keep me up-to-date on critical project information, time lines, etc. The thing I am looking for is how to get project information out of my [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Two current or former colleagues will join me at the  PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 on September 3-4 at Stanford University.
My co-author of Project Sponsorship and close friend is Alfonso Bucero.  All projects need an executive sponsor.  Upper management support for projects consistently surfaces as a critical success factor and sets the pace for [...]

What can we learn from case studies?  Plenty!
While Genentech sponsored a risk management initiative a couple years ago to improve risk identification, analysis, and planning, the results still appeared spotty in terms of widespread application by its project teams,.  But that didn’t stop senior project manager Melanie Ebojo.  With her experience in managing [...]

As a judge for the PMO of the Year sponsored by the Center for Business Practices, I was impressed by all the entries.  One in particular, however, stood out.  PMO Director at Accident Fund Insurance, Norm Buckwalter says, “Through our responsibility of leading the creation and execution of the strategic plan [...]

How do you keep an organization innovative, fast-moving, and productive when facing the relentless parallel needs of ongoing operations, servicing customers, sound project decision-making among opportunities, developing incremental product enhancements, and creating major new offerings – all in the face of inevitable resource constraints?
In a time when so many dot-coms went dot-bust, Cinda [...]

PMI Silicon Valley (www.pmisv.org) and Insights Learning and Development (www.insights.com) have partnered on a study to identify the current strengths and gaps in leadership and teaming effectiveness in Northern California companies.  Insights® is a global learning and development company working in partnership with leading organizations across the world.  Insights transformational learning solutions, delivered [...]

How do you fix a woefully underfunded government organization and implement over 50 significant citizen serving systems in less than 4 years?  What core values helped Honolulu rise to be ranked 8th in the United States in 2007 by the Center for Digital Government for the deployment of Technology?   How do [...]

The global business landscape is littered with expensive, well-intended strategies that don’t deliver value, often because leaders failed to identify and invest in the full range of projects required to support those strategies.  Co-author of Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan demonstrates what organizational alignment for strategic execution really means and how to engage [...]

Creating excellence IN project management is about viewpoints, insights, and practices on why, what, how, and who to optimize project-based work.  This goal is necessary because projects are the means to achieve almost anything in every organization.  Without good project, program, and portfolio management, achieving results is tenuous.  Traditional efforts are not sufficient [...]