Thursday, December 30, 2010

Achieving Project Success


I recently attended a webinar entitled, "Stop Playing Games! Overcoming Politics on Projects" facilitated by Rick Morris, author of Stop Playing Games! A Project Manager's Guide to Successfully Navigating Organizational Politics.

Rick asserts that "project fail because of context, not content" (a concept he learned from reading Radical Project Management, by Rob Thomsett).

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Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Cause of Software Project Failure


I recently attended an online conference sponsored by the IT Metrics & Productivity Institute that focused on improving software development by leveraging best practices and software process improvement theory.

One of the speakers, Bob Charette, a risk management consultant, gave an excellent presentation entitled "Why do Software Projects Fail?”

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Sunday, August 01, 2010

Coaching for Success


I recently came across an article in Information Management magazine, entitled "Coaching for Professional Development".

It describes a management philosophy whereby, "Managers should encourage, foster and support employee's continual development as a way of helping them master changing work and keeping morale high". The ultimate goal is to keep employees motivated and productive.

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Sunday, April 04, 2010

Start with the Basics


Vince Lombardi used to begin every new season with his "Gentlemen, this is a football" speech. He talked about its size and shape, how it can be kicked, carried, or passed.

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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Death March



I first heard the term Death March about 10 years ago. Our principal architect (Ross, one of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with) pulled me aside and said: "Just you watch, Doug. This project will become a Death March. And, it will be your job to guard the exits - preventing us from leaving until our daily toil is done".

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Friday, March 19, 2010

Hope is Not a Strategy



I remember the first time I heard this phrase - a mentor of mine at Hewlett-Packard gave me this advice many years ago. He used that along with my other favorite "Denial is not a River in Egypt".

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As I previously wrote, MS Project is a really useful tool, particularly, for modeling "what if" scenarios. It's also quite useful for tracking project status.

With that being said, a common complaint that I hear (from project managers, development managers, test leads, etc.), is that the effort required to keep the model up-to-date is too high - particularly in the world of software product development - where change is the order of the day.

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