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Nine Ways To Eliminate Honesty Buffers

Eliminating “Honesty Buffers” helps to confront your organizational project management bad habits and hence improve your productivity and quality.   Here are nine techniques I’ve used to successfully reduce the “Honesty Buffers.” In Eliminate Your Project Management Honesty Buffers I talk about how you can apply...
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Eliminate Your Project Management Honesty Buffers

Manufacturing buffers help to smooth over problems at each stage of production. The project management tool "honesty buffer" is when someone holds back reporting issues and problems to make things look better than they are. Reducing or eliminating such buffers quickly exposes problems and enables rapid process and quality improvement.
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Project Management Needs Business Intelligence!

Look into using your existing business systems as part of your project management tools. The business systems used by everyone to do their daily jobs can often provide more current and predictive information than relying solely on our traditional project management tools.
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Meeting Madness? Don’t Do it!

Meeting Madness
All I had to do was to get about 500 software defects fixed, according to my project management tools. My boss told me I had to have daily meetings with everyone concerned to get this done. This meeting centric approach to managing this project turned out to be utter madness. Simple measurements, that anyone can do, demonstrated that these meetings had no discernible impact.
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Defect Reports Are Your Best Friend!

This post is adapted from an e-mail I had sent to a CEO who was looking for project management tools to help deliver his products when promised. In the past his organization had successfully been able to know precisely where their product readiness stood. Trending defects will work well in managing projects of all types.
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Get The Project Management Schedule Right!

Project management tools and techniques help us to do the job we need to do. Yet, the tools can often become overwhelming with updating them, trying to get just the right report out of them, etc. It is easy to lose track of what we are trying to achieve. Estimating a schedule is one of the most critical things we will do so let's see if we can get it right.
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If Nothing Else, Honesty Is Just More Efficient

Honesty in project management reporting is just more efficient. Just report the status of a project as it is. If things are late, it will show things as late. If things are confused, it will show things as confused. Spending valuable time making things look better on slides than it does in reality is not productive.
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