Project Management Soft Skills Defined: Emotional Intelligence

17 October, 2007
People Management
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Illud iterum dicere potes! I've had a number of discussions, with some of the best project managers I know, as we discuss ways to simplify methodologies and streamline our delivery process. Many organizations are trying to train their next generation of project managers, and all seem to run into the same basic problem. You can hand someone the PMBOK, teach them how to use MS Project, and send them off to PMI certification classes - but that doesn't guarantee an…

The Five Fundamental Rules of Project Management

15 October, 2007
Project Management
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Okay, the title is a bit of a false advertising. I'm not revealing the top five rules - I'm actually looking for help in defining rules #3-5. Any input is appreciated - care to weigh in with an opinion? I've had a number of discussions, with some of the best project managers I know, as we discuss ways to simplify methodologies and streamline our delivery process. Many organizations are trying to train their next generation of project managers, and all…

Chargebacks Redux – Some Good May Come Of It

Okay - to be fair, that really wasn't the end of the chargebacks conversation. One of my cohorts suggested that we each come up with an argument counter to our position; I needed to come up with something "good" about chargebacks. Actually, it's quite easy to come up with the one good thing; the only problem is that it's something that most IT departments can't take advantage of ... Transparency Many business units, dissatisfied with the speed, efficiency, general business…

Yet Another Discussion on IT Chargebacks

It felt anachronistic, getting into a surprisingly good conversation on the pros and cons of IT chargebacks this past week ... We're not seriously thinking about it (thank goodness), but a group of us did go through the intellectual exercise of discussing the good/bad/ugly of such an approach. Unfortunately, most of the "debate" focused on positive and negative experiences in the past. I think this is not an effective way to petition for such a change; it would be better…

Interesting How the Mind Works

My mother has always been an accomplished letter writer - her travelogues are definitely worth keeping. Lately, she's adapted her flair for the written word to email, having amassed a healthy mailing list of relatives, grandchildren, etc. Here's one she sent last month - I thought it was an interesting insight into the nature of learning. She's taking care of my aging grandmother, and writes ... ... when I was cleaning out mother's [room] ... I found a pile of…

Five Best Conversations with my Meebo (web IM) Client

29 August, 2007
Social Media
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Back in January, I added the Meebo client to my blog page, and over the past few months I've learned a lot about web chat in general ... There are other clients out there, and I've tried a few - most recently the AIM Wimzi, which came close to unseating Meebo as my web chat client of choice. Wimzi and Google Talk will allow me to use Trillian as a client, solving two problems I have with Meebo - logging…

Communication is the responsibility of …

Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is hard. Hard to introduce, hard to teach/coach, hard to require, hard to create. Which, added all up together, often make it hard to use. It may sound like unfounded pessimism, as the Internet is loaded with examples of successful collaborative sites that aggregate and repackage knowledge - it's been doing that for years, ever since there were Compuserve forums and bulletin boards. Unfortunately (for the corporate environment), the Law of Large Numbers takes care of…

Aggravating Vendor Behavior – Ever Heard of CRM?

I got a call a few weeks ago that put me in a slightly cranky, slightly bemused mood. This is not a recent phenomenon - it has happened at every company in my career. A few of the big-name vendors (including IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP, and others) have no problem peppering different people in a company with requests for basic information (What systems are your running? Do you have a general ledger system? Do you use computers? Do you…

The Right Web 2.0 Tool for The Job

16 July, 2007
Web 2.0
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I've had many discussions over the past few weeks on this post, trying to define the difference between Blogs, Discussion Forums, Wikis, and other Web 2.0-style collaboration tools. In a particularly interesting tight loop this morning, I got into an IM conversation on the issue via my little Web 2.0 Meebo widget, tucked away in the corner of my blog. Over the course of the conversation, my colleague "introduced" himself with a reference to his blog - The Best of Enterprise…

Thoughts on Why Tech Folks Need to Sweat the Administrivia Details

As I've noted in the past, it really helps to understand the techies' way of thinking, especially when trying to get work done on tasks that are decidedly non-technical. Here's two more recent stories from work, both hinging on the common desire to just "git'er done". Why do we waste time removing obsolete code? Just hide the menu option ... A few months ago, we had a task to decommission a chunk of code that was calculating some elapsed time information…