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Sharpening the Saw
Posted by Rich Crowley on Jan 3, 2016 in books, Change, Personal Improvement, thinking | 0 comments
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, approaches, etc.) as well as where some aspect of...
read moreEstablishing Ownership of Deliverables
Posted by Rich Crowley on Dec 30, 2015 in management, people, planning, Project Management | 0 comments
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 process). There are many ways to bring a deliverable...
read moreIn The Beginning, The Project Team
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 15, 2012 in Project Management, teams | 0 comments
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 the team together, either physically whenever...
read moreProject Strategies and the Importance of Being Able to Think Critically
Posted by Rich Crowley on Oct 2, 2012 in Project Management, strategy | 0 comments
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 could perhaps be summarized as “building...
read moreCollaboration and Enterprise IT
Posted by Rich Crowley on Sep 19, 2012 in Big Data, IT Architecture, Project Management, strategy | 0 comments
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 underneath. This buildout was somewhat repeated or...
read morePair Programming
Posted by Rich Crowley on Sep 18, 2012 in development, Programming | 0 comments
There’s an interesting new model being used in the software development space. It’s called Pair Programming. It works pretty much the way it sounds. Two developers working on a single codebase together. Here’s an article that provides some background info. I like the idea, but must admit, haven’t tried it. To me, it sounds like a good fit in companies where new technology is being introduced that directly affect developers. (By that, I mean that if a new piece of infrastructure is being introduced, that...
read moreA Real Good Business Book
Posted by Rich Crowley on Sep 10, 2012 in books, entrepreneurship, thinking | 0 comments
A few weekends back, while enjoying a beach day with family, I took along a book I had purchased a couple of months ago named “Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself”. It’s written by Alan Webber, one of the co-founders of Fast Company magazine. It looked like a quick read, ideal for an afternoon in the sun. Well, it wasn’t a quick read at all. It could have been but I enjoyed it enough that I found myself stopping fairly often to think through the lessons he was laying down....
read moreWhen Winning Isn’t Winning
Posted by Rich Crowley on May 25, 2012 in management, Negotiating | 0 comments
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a seasoned executive who had run a tech company and who had orchestrated that company’s sale to a larger tech company, making lots of shareholders of the former very happy. It turned out that I had been one of the initial users of his company’s flagship product many years before. It was a wonderful product and was arguably the crown jewel that ultimately triggered the purchase of his company. What I found interesting was that all those years later, this exec was quite vocal about...
read moreMotivational Graffiti
Posted by Rich Crowley on Apr 21, 2012 in art, emotions, Personal Improvement | 0 comments
I saw this graffiti painted on a wall of a utility building while running on the Iron Horse Trail in Kitchener a couple of months back. I liked it so much, I went back a few days later and snapped this picture. For some reason, it really resonated with me. I equated it with the old saying “What have you done for me lately?” or “You’re only as good as your last game”. However, this has a more upbeat feel to it. It has a classic message that is a call to dust yourself off and get back at it. Whether you got it...
read moreWhen Delays Are More Than Delays
Posted by Rich Crowley on Mar 4, 2012 in Change, planning, Project Management | 0 comments
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 as many tasks as are visible at a point in time,...
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