I am an optimist about people. Generally I believe that people don’t want to do a bad job at work and therefore I believe success is a matter of ‘fit’ between the person and the role. I have seen several examples of this in my career...
Mobile application development is full of hard choices. Although there is a seemingly insatiable appetite for ever-smarter handheld mobile devices and the applications these enable, developers have to decide which subset of the available mobile market they want to write applications for, in order to get a worthwhile and profitable return for their effort.
In the course of assessing project management capabilities for clients, a practice that I’ve found absent across most non-projectized organizations is the evaluation of team members at the end of a project by the project’s leadership. Usually, the rationale provided for this gap is that the functional managers do not consistently solicit this feedback from project managers, or when this feedback has been offered in the past, it has been ignored.
It's the classic Catch-22. If your organization does not spend sufficient time evaluating project requests before projects are formally authorized or executed, predictability of project outcomes decrease.
As we are beginning to emerge from the recession (and starting to feel as though we've survived the worst of it), executives are beginning to think about "what's next" - how to achieve their strategy and translate it into bottom line results. Yet, they are still tentative about making significant moves and spending precious cash. Thus, I'm seeing a reemergence of the value of project planning.
Projects are risky undertakings. This is because they are usually unique and complex, based on assumptions and constraints, with a range of stakeholders, and dependent on the performance of people. Given these tough challenges, it is not surprising that some projects fail. How are we doing?
As more organizations work virtually, managers of traditional work teams are tapped to lead geographically dispersed teams. When thrust into this unfamiliar territory, many managers flounder, especially those who rely on command-and-control tactics to get work done across locations, functions, cultures and time zones.
There may be a number of seemingly valid reasons that are used to justify risk acceptance ranging from “It’ll never happen, so why worry?” to “Dealing with challenges builds character”. Regardless of the rationale that is used, it is the project manager who ultimately bears the responsibility when a risk occurrence threatens to derail a project. In this column we look at some useful tactics for dealing with those situations where the prevailing attitude is “If it happens, the project manager will take care of it.”
A project schedule is a foundation tool. For most accidental project managers, the schedule is the plan. Given this, one would expect that on an average active project, the schedule should be current and accurate.
You thought that this day would never come – the scope of your project has been delivered and you are ready to close out the project. Your team breathes a sigh of relief and looks forward to some well earned time off. Unfortunately, the project closeout phase can sometimes cause more grief than all the other project phases combined.
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