 Reforming Project Management |
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Friday, September 27, 2002
Cranium Over-Communicates for Project Success
A few weeks ago I wrote about Patrick Lencioni's Leadership Trilogy. In his book Four Obsessions of an Effective Executive he proposes two must-have disciplines:
..create organizational clarity
..over-communicate organizational clarity
One company, Cranium, profiled by INC Magazine Inside the Smartest Little Company in America attributes their success to these disciplines. They've done it by developing their own vocabulary.
Why am I writing about a toy company? To show the power of the principles. Cranium is a product development company that relies heavily on their ability to innovate. As such they are always doing projects. To my knowledge they are not using a lean approach. However, they are working with a variety of people on an always-distributed basis for getting their new products to market.
The founders came from Microsoft. That's right. And they brought the MS way of product development with them. One of the hallmarks of MS is the attention given to communicating the goal. (A computer on every desk and in every home) Cranium's goal: to create moments in a game where every player can shine -- appearing smart and funny in front of their teammates. Cranium took this one step further. They created a vocabulary so everyone associated with a project would know just how to act. They call it CHIFF: clever, high quality, innovative, friendly, and fun. They go all out making sure every employee and every partner understands the goal and the guiding principles. By over-communicating just these two things Cranium now sits at the top of the heap. And the odds of any new game surviving, let alone making it to the top, are a long shot.
So, what could we be doing? I often see teams go to the step of setting a goal and agreeing to guiding principles, but then fail to take it the next step: over-communicating. "How many times do I have to say...?" is a project managers lament. When it comes to communicating the goal and the principles (or standards) we can't say them enough. Put that in your cranium.
Thursday, September 26, 2002
The Greatest Project Management Website? Perhaps!
Dr. Edward Hoffman, Director of the NASA Academy of Program and Project Leadership claims there isn't a better magazine for project management than ASK Magazine. I've poked around for awhile and read a few articles and reviews including the Conference Report: Masters Forum IV, February '02. One of the highlights was a presentation made by Greg Howell on lean project delivery. Don Margolies, from Goddard (Space Center), remarked, "Greg Howell's talk was among the highlights of the meeting for me. Thought provoking, radical (in my experience) and screaming out for future considerations." I noticed more than a dozen links to Fast Company articles. I'm beginning to see what Dr. Hoffman is talking about.
BTW, for more provocative thinking from Greg Howell and co-author Lauri Koskela, read the paper Greg delivered in July 2002 at the bi-annual PMI Research Conference 2002 titled The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete.
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Handle Projects with the Web's Help -- Collaboratively
Sometimes I think there's more interest in project software than there is in developing good practices of planning and execution. Maybe it is the 'magic pill' that we oh-so-hope will work. PC Magazine regularly reviews project management software. Earlier this year they reviewed MS Project Professional 2002 and MS Server 2002 in the article Enterprise-Level Project Management from Microsoft. In the most recent issue they looked at the web-based competition in the article Handle Projects with the Web's Help. I'm more interested in what they do not write about than what they do. Perhaps they don't know how to manage projects.
PCMag emphasizes the conventional practices of large project management in their reviews: work breakdown sturctures, organization breakdown structures, costing, resource-loading, statusing, and CPM scheduling. Some of these programs do well in all categories (MS Project and Artemus) others are strong in the emerging practices -- especially collaboration. In spite of their emphasis on conventional practices, PCMag gave it's coveted Editor's Choice award to Project.net saying, "Project.net is a capable and flexible product—especially for individual team members. Companies that want to emphasize collaboration over the centralized planning common to many enterprise project management programs will like its approach." Project.net differs in functionality from all the other applications:
"Project.net avoids terminology and processes associated with traditional project management apps. Instead, it uses an approach called Project Lifecycle Methodology, which includes planning and scheduling for Lifecycles (projects), Phases (project stages), Gates (milestones), and Deliverables (completed tasks or document elements).
"Project.net emphasizes a more collaborative (bottom-up) approach to project management rather than centralized planning (top-down). This philosophy is obvious in the Workflow Designer, a project management tool that lets users (not just project managers) create a series of tasks or documents."
So...some people are getting it -- projects evolve; planning is collaborative (conversational); and centralized control is an illusion.
Sunday, September 22, 2002
Blogging and IM-ing: New Verbs for PMs
Have you collaborated online? I have. All day long. (Ok, only 14 Hrs.) I've been using AOL Instant Messenger to aid my son in his research project. From one link to the next we began to build a picture of blogging that could change the practices of project management. How? By putting performers in the position of planning and collaborating throughout the project. The tools are robust. They are easy to use and set-up. With access to a little space on a company server you're ready to go.
What could it look like? The major project participants would be co-authors of the weblog. They would post as they need to or on a schedule. They might include project documents, schedules, contracts, etc. Other participants would use commenting tools to ask questions, offer suggestions, and give their opinions. So no one misses what is going on, they all would subscribe to the project weblog. During my adventures yesterday I found a subscription service from Bloglet that I've added to this site. (Subscribe to this one today!) There are also free calendar tools and search engines (I use Atomz.) to fill out the project weblog.
Planning is conversation. That conversation is principally one for coordinating action and making assessments. Blogging is a new verb for getting it done. The world of projects may never be the same.
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