In 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...
Read MoreWhen Delays Are More Than Delays
One of things I’ve learned over many projects big and small is that delays in any aspect of a project can have some unanticipated consequences. One of the most common but unintuitive of these consequences is that sometimes a simply delay in one task, or task group, can actually result in changes to the definition of a task or task group that is dependent on the work that is delayed. Why do I suggest this is unintuitive? Consider that project managers typically build plans by identifying...
Read MorePlaying With A Lead
Early last month, the Canadian National Junior Hockey team lost the gold medal game 5-3 to Russia at the annual world junior championship tournament held in Buffalo. There was much anguish across the land not so much because they lost, but because they had it won and then gave it away. You see, the Canuck lads led 3-0 at the end of the second period. That’s a decent lead and it was a lead they had built up by playing very well to that point in the game. The Russians scored twice in a...
Read MoreHow To Benefit From Running Projects You Know Nothing About
I have heard it suggested that PM’s really don’t need to know much about the essence of a project to manage it. Their role isn’t to be the expert (or anything close to one) but to simply plan and manage the project work towards its ultimate objectives and goals. I have a problem with this. I have been a PM for enough years to have learned that on projects where I knew very little about the guts of what needed to be accomplished, it was a whole lot more difficult for me to manage, and I...
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