Risk

By Loyal Mealer • February 10th, 2009

I’m sure you’ve all heard that old saying, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” That adage applies just as well to project managers where ‘bold’ equals ‘risk-taking’.  I’m also sure you’ve all attended at least one management pep talk about taking risks (if so, you may [...]

One often-used lament I hear on projects and in project management classes is, “No one here wants to deal with realistic schedules and budgets.”   Interestingly, there seems to be two perspectives on this phenomenon…
First, from the “worker bee” perspective, there is a sense that “management” always “discounts” the estimates.
Second, from the “management” perspective, there is [...]

Most of my work revolves around the power of creating breakthroughs through extreme optimism and hideously positive thinking for which “hyperbole” simply isn’t a big enough word. I frequently rant and rave about the hazards of know-it-alls who poo-poo every idea and wield their negativity like a scythe, cutting down anything new or imaginative in [...]

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. – Warren Buffett
There is no point in denying that change is in the air.  You can prepare yourself so that you’re in the best position where you are, but [...]

By Andrew Meyer
“Times change, we change with them.” – Latin Proverb
In 1983, US companies spent $32 billion on IT, which accounted for 9.8% of their total investment in fixed assets that year.  By 2006, spending had risen almost tenfold, to $294 billion, and IT accounted for 21.1% of new fixed assets purchased that year in [...]

By Andrew Meyer
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are. – David C. McCullough
This is the part 2 of 4 looking at the credit crisis:

You may be a user of risk Probability-Impact Tables; after all they are one of the most popular risk management tools. But how do you bring the important risk factors of Complexity and Immaturity into your project risk management? You can do it the hard way, or:

Technorati Tags: probability-impact, project-management, Risk

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 [...]

Selecting the right kind of engagement model with your offshore programmers (or the company where they work) is the best way to ensure you get more dynamic engineers that will deliver your software with the level of quality you would expect from your own software engineers in the U.S.
Even excellent project management will feel like [...]

Offshoring of software development is written off by some as not workable. Many have shared offshoring nightmares and horror stories in articles and blog postings. A recent survey says small company CIOs say they have little interest in increasing their offshore outsourcing in 2008. And many have stopped outsourcing altogether because of management challenges.

94% Are [...]

The programming press and IT journals are full of stories about the failure of software outsourcing. The statistics are sobering. Less than 50% of outsourcing meets financial objectives. The outsourcing of many business processes besides software development also has the same less-than-stellar results.
Forrester reports the top three causes of outsourcing failure are:

Technorati Tags: Global-teams, Metrics, [...]

Wow, I guess they’ve got a for dummies book on everything now.  Awesome.  There is also of course the 10 minute project manager book in case you find yourself dubbed project manager 10 minutes before the kick off meeting. 

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I thought it would be fun to list some impressions of favorite and least favorite Project management books and methodologies.  I wrote none of these.  You too, can feel free to refute my oppinions or add your own replies or spam us with the latest project managment religion.  Why not?  Everyone else does. 

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We’ve all been there. “Here’s a project. It needs to be done in three months!” You get that sinking feeling that you are already late and you don’t even know what it is that the project is trying to achieve.
How do you handle these situations?
In my experience, the worse thing you can do as a [...]

We weren’t built for this. “This” being a life in which we are constantly in a stress response. That is my key take away from a fascinating book by MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Robert Sapolsky.
In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Sapolsky writes that we aren’t built to withstand constant, high levels of stress. And that our [...]

One thing that never changes is the constancy of change. That seems like a self-evident truth, doesn’t it? So why do we plan as if change will not happen?People in general are fairly good at managing change, but of course we vary widely in those abilities among individuals. As a result, I believe most of [...]

There is a group of forensic chemists who gather periodically for something called “The Bite-mark Breakfast”, where they are treated to a slide show of various bite marks which they attempt to identify while enjoying their eggs, sausage and toast. (This popped into my head this morning as I was feeding my cat. [...]

The applause was thundering as the magician completed his performance. Proman A. Jecgert had hired the magician to help celebrate the completion of what would come to be called Phase One. The party included all participants across the organization. The grove in the trees was a perfect setting, and the sun shone [...]

 
OK here is the scenario – Do you pass the “ink blot test”??.
It is Friday afternoon on the day before a holiday weekend. You are on the telephone to a venture capital company in New York wanting to know about RoHS impact. The project you are working on since October and which has had three [...]

A mentor of mine once attributed this quote to General George Patton. I don’t know for sure if Patton said this first, but I do know that these are words for every Program/Project Manager to live by. I’m not saying that running a program is equivalent to waging war, although it may seem that way [...]

Have you ever been the program manager on a job where you planned everything down to the smallest detail; you collected the requirements, got your experts together, reviewed what it would take to perform the development, and finally presented your plan to upper management.  They were so impressed with your presentation that

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