 Reforming Project Management |
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Friday, March 07, 2003
PM Envy
Chris Tulino offers this cheeky view on project managers:
Every project manager I know is looking for a "good" project. A project that is not a nightmare, where success can happen. This is similar to the hopeless romantics looking for true love. It's not that it doesn't exist. It's just not practical to spend time looking for it. If you get lucky, you get lucky. But for the most part, you just buckle down and do the best you can with every situation that arises. If you work at it hard enough, in six months, this project could become a great project. But you can't just will it to be great and you won't just find it out there somewhere.Chris hasn't posted for awhile, but when he does it shouldn't be missed. He's got a great twist on a Yankee Swap he calls Cut-Throat Pollyanna. I'm already looking forward to next Christmas! Thursday, March 06, 2003
The Management Secrets of the Brain
M. Mitchell Waldop urges us to manage projects from the bottom up. In an article published in Business 2.0 in October 2002 (so I've been sitting on this one for awhile...) The Management Secrets of the Brain he draws parallels to recent understanding of how our brains work to managing organizations.
Your brain is the ultimate example of a complex, decentralized organization. And because we (usually) behave coherently, smoothly integrating new circumstances as they arise, the brain is also the epitome of an adaptive organization, a learning organization, a shared-vision organization -- in short, the ideal modern company.Waldop makes five claims:
Monday, March 03, 2003
Project Management Just Unnecessary Overhead?
Why fight a company culture that doesn't support project management practices. Instead, go stealth. That's the advice of Donna Fitzgerald writing in her column for Builder.com The Nimble Project Manager. Donna has been writing the column since September '02. She is also a co-founder of the The NewGrange Center for Project Management.
In the first of her three-part series on Stealth Project Management Stealth PM: How to craft a successful launch, quietly Donna offers three sets of declarations and standards for organizing a stealth project. The three golden rules of stealth project management:
In her second article Stealth PM: Staying on track Donna falls back on conventional wisdom of managing projects making the usual prescription to control time, scope, and risk. Donna wraps-up the series with Stealth PM: Learning from your mistakes. She urges the stealth PM to conduct an informal lessons learned.
While stealth PM might be a legitimate approach, it is based on a resignation towards the organization and in many ways is just a rehash of conventional wisdom. It's the resignation that bothers me. Project managers and teams do their best work in moods of ambition, determination, and appreciation. What a hill to climb starting out in resignation. The three-part series takes a blind-eye to this issue. Successful projects are much more than the sum of their practices. It takes people operating in good spirits while tending to an always uncertain and unfolding future. Perhaps that's why some companies don't support usual project management practices; they are insufficient for success. Managing Product Development
I added a new weblog to my blogroll today. So, what's the big deal? The weblog is by Johanna Rothman. It's titled Managing Product Development. Johanna is a prolific writer of articles and stories on project management appearing in almost 20 publications. While she devotes most of her attention to software development her views apply more generally to project management.
Take a look at her list of articles. You might remember my posting Managing Work Not Time on two of her articles. Make it a point to stop by at her site and read her weblog. You won't be disappointed. Visit the Archives for more postings |
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