UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley

The Priority Battles

Have you ever worked for someone who said ALL requirements are high priority ? Yeah ! We all have. Customers often are insistent upon the delivery of a certain feature set by a certain timeline that may seem impossible to meet. If everything is high priority, nothing is !
Project teams often bear of the brunt of this indecisiveness. Impossible targets, lack [...]

Control – the Illusion

Know any control-freaks?

For many of them, control is an illusion. Paradoxically, by grasping for more control, they often get less.

Politics or influence?

The ability to influence people is a good skill for a project manager. Isn’t it?
Isn’t it our job as PMs to influence people on the project? To find ways to get our stakeholders onboard?

Could it be that one person’s influencing can be another’s political manipulation?

Teams? Why not just have a meeting?

Teams. It seems like such an obvious part of project life.
Or, is it?
Recently, I’ve been noticing some things about project teams that trouble me.
Here are some descriptions of a team:

A group of two or more people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose and approach for which the team holds its members [...]

Commitment – Inspiration that Never Fails

Inspiration is important, but we can’t depend on it showing up when needed. It comes and goes, like a ferral cat who roams looking for a bite to eat. We can feel inspiration waxing and waning within us, and the inspiration from the outside world can’t be counted upon to show up on a regular [...]

Money Doesn’t Inspire

Some people in the corporate world still believe that people work for money. But with a growing number of examples of people doing all kinds of work for free, it’s getting more difficult to adhere to that view. Take Wikipedia, for example. According to Wikinomics, by Tapscott & Williams, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in [...]

The Politics of Inspiration and Shame

As a project leader, part of your job is to inspire people to persevere in pursuit of seemingly impossible goals. In my work, it’s not part of my job . . . that’s pretty much all I do. A decade leading projects was the perfect preparation for this work. Lately I’ve been spending about half [...]

Leveraging Team Member Skills

As an incognito project manager, I found it quite motivating when our team leader acknowledged and made use of background and skills that I possessed beyond the task I was brought in to provide.

Tapping into these skills to help solve the problems we were facing and to better manage our stakeholders established a higher [...]

Lessons on Lessons Learned

As an incognito project manager, I found it very refreshing to watch and participate in discovering and applying lessons learned throughout the life of the project. It seemed like just about every other week we were talking about some level of lessons learned and how we were going to apply them – both to this [...]

Lessons in Being Proactive

Once again as an Incognito Project Manager, here are some observations on the Power of being Proactive…

Prior to my coming onto the team, our project manager had been hard at work preparing the way for our initiative. Many hours strategizing plus preparing and presenting the business case clearly made all the difference for our success. [...]

Lessons from an Incognito Project Manager

I recently changed hats from project team-builder to project team member. As the e-learning course developer on the team, it has been a very enlightening experience to watch and support our most excellent project manager in action.

This week I will share what this PM and others I have known have done that has made [...]

Wrap Up

I believe that most people in the computer-using community (which now is just about everybody in the developed nations) want to do the right thing, and can do the right thing. They just need to know what the right things are, and how to do them.

Administrative Security Controls

Administrative controls are perhaps most important, because they most directly impact your people. On the one hand, they are the simplest, since all it takes is education. On the other hand, education about the hazards of smoking or the possibility that having sex causes pregnancy hasn’t done much to change behaviors in those realms. Well, rather than throw up our hands and give up, let’s tackle administrative controls anyhow…

Technical Security Controls

There is a lot to talk about with regard to technical security controls, aka the “sexy stuff” like firewalls and IDS. So rather than bore you with technobabble (in Scrappy Information Security, I start with packets, headers, ports & MACs as a way of introducing how the Internet works), I will instead focus on an explanation of encryption.

Physical Security Controls

I think most of us “get” physical security. Still, a few basic (and a few not-so-basic) physical security controls worth discussing include…

InfoSec 101

When teaching “InfoSec 101,” I reflect back on my early career as a reporter, and focus on answering the standard questions: who, what, why, where, when, and how. Since this is a Scrappy Book, let’s throw caution to the wind and take them out of order…

Scrappy Information Security

We’re adults, and we like to know “why.” I would like to share some of the whys of information security, so that you can understand why the infosec guys can be so darned stubborn.

Change Leadership: What to Be and What to Do

To wrap-up this week on being a change leader, here’s my short list of what to be and what to do:
BE
- A person with character; leadership descends from character
- Visionary – Have a vision of the “changed” project
- Reliable and consistent to develop and maintain trust with your team
DO:
- Take a couple steps at a [...]

Change Leadership takes one step after the other

There’s one significant characteristic of a leader that I have not mentioned:
Be a model for those behaviors and traits that you are asking others to develop.
If this is done at the start of the project, it becomes part of the project “culture”. If your team sees collaboration and good listening habits, they usually will behave [...]

Change Leadership and Moving through the Fog…

So far I’ve covered the concepts that change leadership requires a vision and trust:

Vision to provide direction
Trust so that the team believes in the vision

I mentioned that the leadership begins by defining the “New End” (the vision). During the detailed “defining the new requirements and integrating with the progress to date, so we [...]

Change Leadership and Trust

Yesterday I covered 3 points for change leadership and project management:
1.      You implement change everyday in your role as a project manager
2.      You are in a leadership role
3.      Major change requires strong leadership, starting with SEEING the “new” END
SEEING the “new” END becomes the VISION of what you and your team will be working to [...]