Sharpening the Saw
One of the benefits of being a free agent / contractor is that between contracts, you get to wipe the slate clean and start over. Downtime between gigs provides the opportunity to evaluate what worked and what didn’t in your last engagement and in general, assess and document what you learned. It also affords you the opportunity to overlay your last engagement with all your prior experiences. It’s quite interesting to see what similarities you find (in people, company cultures,...
Read MoreEstablishing Ownership of Deliverables
The fundamental elements of value that a project provides to its stakeholders are sometimes known as deliverables. Attempting to articulate a project’s deliverables at the beginning of a project is a good way to define what the project sponsors are expecting to gain upon successful completion of the project. Deliverables can range from the very complex (a large new software system) to the relatively simpler (a high level written assessment by a third party of an existing business...
Read MoreIn The Beginning, The Project Team
One aspect of project management that I really enjoy is my involvement in the creation and putting into motion of the core project team. By creation, I don’t mean working with resource managers and senior stakeholders to simply identify the key people the project will require and assigning roles in some document. While that is important, that is a prior step. No, when I say “the creation and putting into motion of the core project team” I am referring to the initial steps required to pull...
Read MoreProject Strategies and the Importance of Being Able to Think Critically
In commercial and public organizations, it is typically the responsibility of senior management to set and communicate the high level direction of the organization. This direction should be a succinct summary of what the organization is all about and is often equated to being the vision and/or purpose of the company. I believe this directional element of an organization should answer the question of why the organization exists and what it produces. Apple Computer’s vision / purpose...
Read MoreCollaboration and Enterprise IT
In a keynote speech earlier this year at a Big Data conference in California, Geoffrey Moore talk about how the consumerisation of IT will affect the enterprise. Here are some of this thoughts and implications from my perspective. He suggested that since the 1970’s, enterprise IT has focused on building / deploying large systems of record. These would be the admin systems, billing systems, finance and HR systems with the requisite building blocks like database management systems...
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