It is very common these days to hear people talk about multi-tasking. Many believe multi-tasking helps them to be more efficient, get more things done and generally be available to everyone all the time. Ready access to information through Blackberrys, cell phones, text messaging and e-mails perpetuate the ability to multi-task.
But numerous studies have demonstrated that multitasking — at least in the way that most people hope it will work — doesn’t really exist. ...
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Unleashing the Power of Project
Management
Part 3 - What is Missing in Traditional Project
Management
By Dr. Aaron J.
Shenhar
As mentioned in the previous article, the current, standard, and formal approach to project management is based on a predictable, fixed, relatively simple, and certain model. It is also generally decoupled from the changes in the environment or the business needs; once you created the project plan, this plan sets out the objectives for the project, and the project manager must execute the plan, using a “management-as-planned” philosophy. After the project is launched, progress and performance are assessed against the plan and changes to the plan should be rare, and if possible avoided. Consider the following two major drivers of project management today:
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Common Barriers to Successful Projects -
#8-14
By Raymond
Posch
In this series, I am writing briefly about some barriers to projects success that are fairly common in my experience. Here are the next seven in my list:
- Poor requirements gathering, analysis, specification – Having well understood requirements is critical to project success, regardless whether a classical waterfall, iterative cycle, agile, or other methodology is used. If you do not have the requirements, the team cannot develop the solution to those requirements. So having a methodology and understanding how to work through it is important. Also, the PM must determine who will do the gathering, analysis, and specification of the requirements – ideally it should be done by business analysts who are knowledgeable about business requirements for the type of project.
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Unleashing the
Power of Project Management
Part 4 - The New Adaptive Project Management
Framework
By Dr. Aaron J.
Shenhar
Based on our research we suggest changing the paradigm of project management and accepting things as they are. The new framework is success-focused, flexible, and adaptive, and we can simply call it the “Adaptive Project Management Model;” it differs from the traditional approach in several ways, as shown in Table 1.
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Common Barriers to Successful Projects -
#15-21
By Raymond
Posch
In this series, I am writing briefly about some barriers to project success that are fairly common in my experience. Here are the next seven in my list:
- Not getting team commitment to the plan – When the plan is developed with team involvement, they will naturally be bought in. But by asking them to commit to the plan, they will more likely point out where they have doubts about or problems with the plan. When the team resolves those issues and commits individually and collectively to the plan, probability of success quadruples. Believe me.
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Common Barriers to Successful Projects -
#22-27
By Raymond
Posch
In this series, I am writing briefly about some barriers to project success that are fairly common in my experience. Here is the last set in my list:
- Lack of resource management in the organization – Of course there is some kind of “resource management” in place, but if the organization has not stepped up to managing specialized people resources in effective ways for competing projects, there will be many issues like several mentioned in this list.
Learn from my biggest
mistakes
By Sarah
Gilbert
Gurus love to tell us that we learn the most from the mistakes we make. I’m not sure that is true, and I’ve made lots of mistakes, so I should know. I will say that my mistakes have been some of my most memorable and conscious (painful!) learning opportunities. I thought that by sharing some of them, I might help others to not repeat them. Although, based on my experience, I am likely to make these mistakes again and so are you!
Don’t take things
personally
This could possibly be the golden rule of project management. ...
Restarting a Project
By
Raymond
Posch
This is a story about having to stop a project gone wrong, examine the team dynamics and project approach that was not working, and then restart the project with a major replan of team organization, work effort, and timeline. (This story also has some useful lessons learned that are applicable to process improvement projects generally with a successful methodology.)
The Context
When I was the PMO manager of a dot.com startup, I was asked to lead a project to "achieve CMM level 3 in the shortest time possible". This was for a subsidiary of Perot Systems that was developing advanced ecommerce systems. It was during those exciting times of the dot.com boom.
The business reason for wanting to get to CMM Level 3 was that our best competitors were advertising CMM Level 3 certification. Our management team thought that having the credential would allow us to prove ourselves more easily and compete in a highly competitive marketplace.
At the time we were still learning what worked and what didn't ...
Projects and the ungrounded
middle
by Raymond
Posch
Because continuous learning is more important than ever in our fast-paced world, I read information technology and project management publications as often as I can. When projects are demanding your time at nearly every moment, it can be hard to do — but you must make the time to break away from the pressure and take in some input from others.