Are You Working Hard?
I’m mentioned in several prior posts that I love sports and the many lessons from the sporting world that can be applied to everyday life, including business. Recently, the Toronto Maple Leafs welcomed a former star back into the fold after several decades of estrangement. Dave Keon, a four-time Stanley Cup champion shared a comment with current Leaf coach Mike Babcock that someone had shared with him early in his career. “Are you working hard or do you think you are working...
Read MoreData Driven Projects
From the dawn of programming time, one of the holy grails that programmers have chased is to avoid hard-coding data values into program code if at all possible. Since most significant applications use some form of database management system, software applications can be developed that are extremely flexible because their behaviour can be changed by manipulating the underlying data, rather than program code. Over the past ten years, I have worked on a ton of projects where application changes...
Read MoreTheory of Constraints
I’m doing some reading on the “Theory of Constraints” (TOC) as it applies to project and portfolio management. In a nutshell, the jist of this theory is that every system is constrained by some bottleneck somewhere in the system. In a project, we often consider this to be the critical path. Too often, we PM’s apply rigour everywhere in our PMBOK-centric approach to managing our projects in an optimal way. TOC stands this approach on its head and suggests that...
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