Time management

Hmm… I remember the bad old days and maybe some of you are still living tlhem, getting up early or staying late to call some foreign country..

Technorati Tags: agile-leadership, best-practices, common-sense, Cross-cultural-teams, cross-functional-teams, distant-teams, Getting-Things-Done, global-readiness, offshoring, Program-Management, project-management-from-a-distance, Time management, traditional-project-managment

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 [...]

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 [...]

Recently I looked at my calendar and caught myself saying “Sweeeet only 4 hours of meetings today”.  That’s when I realized “I’m in meeting hell”. I had always suspected this, so

Technorati Tags: meetings, Program-Management, project-management, Time management

(Posted anonymously on behalf of a program engineering manager at a fine, upstanding organization where it would be best if his name was not used.)
Things are going well on the home front. I am beginning to draw a lot of correlations between parenting a newborn and succeeding at work. A few examples:
1) [...]

Ugh, the communication pitfall.  We’ve all fallen into them.  The question is, can you get out?  Or better still, can you avoid them next time?  Here are a few common ones:
 

Our product spec change discussions happened over email, and now I can’t tell what we decided on, much less find the supporting material!
I seem to [...]

My ex-husband always made us late for appointments because he’d estimate time “as the crow flies” – not ever taking into consideration red lights, kids having to go to the bathroom, wrong turns or any of the other things that cut into time estimates.  Ray was an engineer – a damn good one at that!

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Alright, I’ve had it with project leaders who think that the whole job can be done from a keyboard! I recently helped one of my client companies hire a project manager for a professional services business. The CEO told me they wanted help because “The last 3 project managers didn’t work out.” [...]

If knowing “HOW” to do something were enough we’d all be rich and thin. There’s always some reason why well-intentioned, educated, experienced professionals are doing the opposite of what they know makes sense. Frequently it’s because they are really busy, and can’t possibly do what needs to be done until someone ELSE changes [...]