project+management category archives
In the middle of the behind the scenes video on how they built the Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video, Adam Sadowsky repeats the words in the title of this piece.
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Glen Alleman has some interesting thoughts about uncertainty in projects and whether we need to estimate better. I wonder if theory of constraints and buffer management points to a different solution.
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Henrik Mårtensson has a nice discussion of how an extreme focus on "cost effectiveness" can severely damage an organization with this mindset.
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Several conversations have me thinking about why projects - any kind of project - falls off the rails so many times, even though people have articulated the lists of why this happens over and over again.
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How Smart Leaders Talk About Time is a "Conversation Starter" from HarvardBusiness.org in October. It talks about the the struggle so many businesses have of having too many things to do and prioritizing amongst them. What is a leader to do?
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How in the world do you get MS Project to show you the calendar-day duration of a task when the "working calendar" of the project is a 5-day work week (or a two-shift, 5-day week; or a three-shift, 7-day week)?
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There are always more good ideas than we have resources to execute those ideas. Dennis Stevens has a look at this from the Agile perspective that inspires my thoughts here.
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In case you think I am a dyed-in-the-wool Theory of Constraints promoter, I point to this article by Dan Trietsch from a 2005 issue of Project Management Journal.
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Phillip G. Armour discusses is the nature of people in groups. There are people (often leaders of some sort) whose behavior sets the tone for the whole group.
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Dennis Stevens has a nice description of how Theory of Constraints and Big Agile relate to each other. I've known that the do, but I hadn't given much thought to the connections.
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Patrick Lencioni was the keynote speaker today at the Project Flow conference. He did a great job of speaking on the topic of "Building a Culture of Teamwork and Engagement" with a focus on telling hilarious stories about business and himself. I suspect you could pick up a lot of the below from reading his books, but here is a summary of the 90 minutes he spent with us today.
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The fundamentals of CCPM workshop was interesting in that I saw some new simulations (games) and he put the vicious cycle of standard operations in a drawing that made a lot of sense to me.
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This week, I get to spend several days in San Francisco at Realization's Project Flow 2009 conference. Hopefully, I get to meet some additional friends.
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Glen Alleman of Herding Cats has a nice piece that talks about planning, What Does a Good Schedule Look Like? I offer up my list of elements of a good schedule.
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Johanna Rothman suggests that one of the shortest words in the English language, is also one of the hardest to say. So, why is it?
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Daniel Markham has some fun with "Estimating Project Size - What To Fix." The focus is on his baliwick of Agile project management, but the general ideas apply to most project planning activities.
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The recent IAM Talking podcast, "The Problems of Process, In Practice," Dan Keldsen hosts a discussion with Bob Lewis of IT Catalysts, and there are a couple of elements that really connected with me.
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Mary Abraham, always interesting, has a good one that relates to something I heard recently from one of my clients.
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I had lunch the other day with Johanna Rothman and the topic of planning research work came up. It is difficult to plan research work because the very nature of research is one of iteration and uncertainty. You don't know if your experiment is going to work, so how can you build a formal plan of everything you plan to do?
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The Standish Group has released their latest survey on project success, CHAOS 2009. And it doesn't sound like good new. In fact, it sounds like the same news. We (collectively) don't know how to manager projects.
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Imagine having your pick of 30 different fireworks. Each has its own effects, but taken in combinations, they can really light up the sky. That's the idea behind Leandro Herrero's Disruptive Ideas, a how-to follow-on to Viral Change.
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A few people mentioned Jonathan Spira's post on "Defining Productivity for the Knowledge Age." He defines the basic problem and promises more in upcoming writing. It will be interesting to see what he has to say.
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John Tropea has been thinking about teams and communities for a while, and he has a nice article that ponders the differences and similarities.
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Brian Tracy has a post on Practicing Solid Time Management in this month's AMA Leaders Edge newsletter. I see a lot of connection to solid project management.
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Paul Young of Product Beautiful has a useful piece on "The Next Frontier of Finding Prospects" via social media websites and services.
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Brad Hinton has an item "On customer experience for information and knowledge projects" that rings another bell in the won't-someone-please-think-about-the-people steeple.
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Andrew Meyer has created the Project Management Excuse List. Very entertaining.
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A few people have mentioned the McKinsey survey report on "Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results." The thing I found most interesting was the list of barriers to implementation.
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Johanna Rothman has a podcast on "How Many Emergency Projects Do You Have?" in which she answer that question for a project manager. My thought was that this thinking is endemic to business. And that the behavior usually demonstrates the exact wrong answer.
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I sat in on a Catalyze Community webinar today, given by Carey Schwaber, a Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research. The topic was "Ten Tips for Driving Better Project Outcomes" and was directed at the Business Analyst role.
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Michael Krigsman at the IT Project Failures blog at ZDNet has an analysis of an ERP project failure. I wonder if it is the fault of the vendor or the buyer?
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The November 2007 Harvard Business Review has an interesting article on knowledge sharing and interface constraints: Are Your Engineers Talking to One Another When They Should?
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David Gurteen's latest Knowledge-Letter contains an interesting piece, suggesting that IT is the cause of Lotus Notes failures - not the underlying technology. This can happen with just about any department.
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How bad / good is the discipline IT project management? Standish Group reports 67% failure rate. A new article in Communications of the ACM report 67% success rate. Isn't that still not good enough?
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I asked a contact a Realization to remind me about a conversation we had several years ago, where he suggested that we probably didn't need to do time tracking.
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PMConnection gives us "10 Signs You Don't Really Know Microsoft Project." But they don't explain why these are a problem. Here is my attempt.
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I recently read a complementary copy of All Your Money Won't Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource by Curt Finch of Journyx. And then this afternoon, I had a nice conversation with Curt around the topics raised in his book as part of his Blog Book Tour.
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Phillip G. Armour's June 2007 quarterly column on The Business of Software in Communications of the ACM was Twenty Percent: Planning to fail on software projects. Good stuff!
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I'm in the middle of reading Personal Information Management, Edited by William Jones and Jaime Teevan. I am missing the typical graphics and drawings that books aimed at the major markets provide.
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Chris Garrett has a nice list of suggested ways to use blogs as a piece of the project management communication puzzle.
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Kevin Fox of the TOC Center has started bloging with the obviously-titled Theory of Constraints blog. The latest entry is on CCPM, More Projects Faster.
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Tyner Blain: "Your project is almost finished. Last week, it was almost finished. And you suspect that next week, it will still be almost finished. Why does this happen, and what can you do about it?" Beautiful.
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Bill Brantley has clarified what he means by "microprojects." I'm not sure they are that different from "normal" projects. What about you?
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Rick Cook at CIO.com has a piece on How to Spot a Failing Project. I can't help but comment on the article after yesterday's post.
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Back in May, Stephen Seay had a bunch of reasons for Why Is My Project Late? at his Project Steps blog. The list included the usual suspects, but what about the management sources?
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Kevin Rutherford has an interesting find, which suggests that lowering the water level is an excellent way to surface the real constraints in a system (you can see the rocks when they aren't covered with water).
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Anne Zelenka at Web Worker Daily had some interesting thoughts about a different mode of productivity that isn't harmed by multi-tasking. "Connected Mode: Multitasking for Productivity."
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C. G. Lynch at CIO.com has Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog from the just-completed Enterprise 2.0 conference.
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Dennis McDonald is looking to survey people who are using blogs to support their project management work, either as the sole tool or in conjunction with other PM tools.
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There's a time for every out-of-scope project task, and the time is later.
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