The FBI Sentinel project had been problem-plagued and had converted over to Agile. The Sentinel project in turn had sprung out of the FBI’s “Virtual Case File” system which was considered a failure. I'm always interested in lessons learned from projects that struggle to be successful.
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July 9, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Success is an amazingly difficult notion to objectively pin down in many projects. While we need to be flexible, I've noted that there is a fine line between flexibility and chaos. Often it is but a single voice that makes all the difference.
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June 27, 2011 Bruce Benson
Metrics
On his first day, Elop sent an e-mail to every employee asking what they thought he should change, what should be left alone,and what they feared he wouldn’t understand. What a great project management tool.
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June 22, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
A carefully selected set of practices that match an organization’s needs is better than using one methodology exclusively.
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June 20, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
I use to travel, a lot. The worst part about travelling was the loss of time. Yes, I could try to work on the plane but it was never very efficient. Inevitably, a lot of the time in travel was just dead time. Boy, did that turn out to be productive!
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June 11, 2011 Bruce Benson
Time Management
I just spent the weekend at Odyssey of the Mind World Finals watching a lot of real smart and very creative kids show their solutions to various creative problems. It reminded me that they were good not only because they were smart and talented, but because they spent their time, with a passion, doing this kind of stuff.
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June 6, 2011 Bruce Benson
Time Management
2 Comments
I kept wondering how we could be world leaders but be so bad at managing our efforts that made us leaders? Something wasn’t quite right in this dichotomy. Maybe, I thought, this is just the cost of being good at what we do -- by failing often.
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May 23, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
The software project manager said he needed more people, more money and more time. This brought to mind a great quote I heard many years ago, that went something like "engineering is doing with $1 what any fool can do with $2."
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May 16, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
“Our strategy is sound. It is aspects of our operational execution that are not.” Boy, how often have I heard that.
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May 10, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
Déjà vu. I’m doing nothing more than helping out as my father-in-law is recovering from having gone to the hospital. All the chaos and concern seemed very familiar in an eerie way ... kind of like … an out of control project!
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May 3, 2011 Bruce Benson
Management
My best mentors helped me figure out how to do my job better by giving me information and insight, and not by yelling at me to work harder or to stop bringing up all my crazy project management tool ideas!
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April 25, 2011 Bruce Benson
Training
Would you tell your project team that it is OK to not get the product working because real-life experience is that sometimes things don’t work out?
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April 11, 2011 Bruce Benson
Team Management
In trying to get a handle on improving product performance, we discovered that simple examples were more effective as project management tools than were complex charts and spreadsheets.
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March 29, 2011 Bruce Benson
Communication
Meetings are seen as either the way we manage projects or the bane of efficient project management. Can boycotting meetings really help us straighten this mess out?
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March 15, 2011 Bruce Benson
Communication
Project managers can see from a kid's morning routine why using data instead of direction can often be a better tool for getting the results we want.
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March 8, 2011 Bruce Benson
Team Management
