Easier said than done – so to speak
I just wrote something up (internal wiki) that I thought was common knowledge, but I think it's one of those soft-skills things that makes total sense once you hear about it - but somebody needs to tell you. I think of one of the reasons that IT (at times) intimidates the business - or why IT gets the cold shoulder when it comes to process improvement efforts - is that we can get a bit too wrapped up in the…
Dennis McDonald and Lee White are conducting an interesting experiment on their blogs, crossposting a conversation about project management and social media. I'll add my voice, with both input on the topic and observations on the method. (Topic) The Right Tool for The Job - depends on the Job The first part of the conversation talks about whether social media could replace classic project management tools, in terms of communicating project status. I agree with Dennis - you can never…
Last time I talked about "cheating" at the PMO prioritization game. Ok, it wasn't cheating, more like a trick to keep your projects small, fast - and easy to fit into a crowded schedule. Totally above board, but some might call it manipulative. Remember the old management hack ... how do eat an elephant? If that's too cliche for you, let's talk about ways to consistently win at the prioritization game. How can you make sure your projects are legitimately…
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…
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…
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…
author's note: 3rd of 3 parts of an essay first published in 2000. Check out part 1 and part 2 ... jpm Address the Rest The elevator speech follows rather quickly from the executive summary. The power of this “sound bite” is in it’s clarity and consistency – make sure that everyone involved in the organization can deliver it the same way. Remember, in a small company, everybody is a salesman! Of course, the elevator speech should not be viewed…
author's note: 2nd of 3 parts of an essay first published in 2000. Check out part 1 here ... jpm Starting in the Middle To get moving on step 1 – capturing the “vision” – we’ll start in the middle with the executive summary. This presentation will help gather the relevant “what”, “why”, and “how”, without going into too much detail or oversimplifying. A little structure now will allow you to quickly summarize the salient points into your elevator speech.…
author's note: I was recently asked about this essay, first published in 2000, so I thought I'd trot it back out as a series of posts. Written near the end of the dot-com boom, it still has some resonance, even with internal IT projects ... jpm Congratulations! Getting that terrific startup idea that has real business potential can be the easiest and the hardest part of going entrepreneurial. It’s fun to bat about ideas, look into new and exciting technologies,…
I've written about the basic project proposal (for consulting groups) or charter (for internal IT) in the past. The point of any project summary document is to tee up the what and the why, using an outline like this: Description: What are we trying to accomplish here? What is our ultimate goal? Objectives: These are project objectives, not business objectives. How will we know we are done? Benefits: Why should we consider doing this? What are we getting? Alternatives: Are…