Retrospectives

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toolbox a treasure chest full of bright, shiny, valuable tools or is it more like Pandora’s Box, full of unreliable, outdated, more-trouble-than-they’re-worth tools?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 [...]

Having made a moniker name called theUnknownPM kinda makes it impossible for me to push my own products so instead let me do the next worst thing for a moment and engage in random philosphy.  How do you know if you are a success or a failure at what you are doing?  Are you a [...]

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 [...]

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!

Technorati Tags: agile, project-management, Retrospectives

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?”

Technorati Tags: change, communication, koans, Leadership, Lessons Learned, questions, Retrospectives

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?

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A friend of mine once told me about a technique for keeping track of lessons learned.  She keeps a file labeled “DNDTA.”  That stands for “Do Not Do This Again.” 
The idea is to write a note to yourself describing something you did that would not be such a good idea to do ever again, then [...]

 
If you read the business news you must be aware of the intense rivalry between the European Airbus Consortium and The Boeing Company dueling to capture the future commercial aircraft market. Both of these companies are in the final stages of major programs to deliver new generation airliners.
These are huge projects worth billions of dollars in both development costs [...]

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.

Technorati Tags: agile, Retrospectives