Recent Posts
Five Project Management Guerilla Techniques
If you have just finished project management training and you are expecting to implement these magic disciplines in a new group, don’t. This article tells you how to lose hope and how to find it again by implementing key guerilla techniques that can lead to good long-term project management discipline. Why Losing Hope Is (Sometimes) Necessary [...]
Want Executives To Love You? 4 Answers For Any Situation
A lot of people think that executives want good news. That is not true. Good executives want the truth. And they want ideas on how to solve problems. Let’s start with what executives hate. Ever listen to an exchange that goes something like this? Executive: Where are we on the launch plan? Bad Answer Person: [...]
Change Is Bad
Robert Kennedy was quoted as saying “Change has its enemies”. I am one of them. At least some of the time. Some change is good. Famously, Thomas Watson Jr. decided to abandon the creation of specialty computers in favor of an all-purpose computer, the System 360. It made all other computers obsolete and ushered in [...]
The Expert Versus the Method
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Although personally, I can’t think of one reason to skin a cat. It gives me the heebee jeebies just thinking about it. Just a minute, I need a drink of water. I’m back. My real point is there are at least two ways to take [...]
Got Approach?
An approach is not the same as a plan. A plan is a set of actions one takes to implement an approach. An approach is the strategy, methods and tools being applied. Let me give you a concrete example. Our team took over a requirements gathering effort. The effort was viewed as in-trouble largely because [...]
Modest Suggestions for Short, High-Burn Projects
A manager once told me his best day was when his phone didn’t ring. His team managed the technical infrastructure at one of the country’s largest healthcare systems. When the phone rang, it was trouble. Today we might extend that hope to no email and no texts – at least of the business sort. Your [...]
High Performance Teams: Culture vs. Checklists
We think a lot about high performance teams. We are in the business of fielding and helping our clients create high-performance teams. What has troubled our leadership team is the chasm that exists in the literature between what might be called “managing the culture” vs. “managing the checklist”. We live in that chasm. It seems [...]
