I face the dilemma: Either be patient and build consensus, or move ahead without the full team’s support. My sense is that it’s time for a change in approach -- time for more personal risk-taking and less conventional wisdom.
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August 3, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Only the knowledge workers know exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. Because knowledge work is invisible, no one else, including the managers, can understand what the knowledge workers are doing or how they are doing it.
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July 30, 2011 Bruce Benson
Team Management
7 Comments
Oh no, I’ve got a room full of computer "experts." None of them have any training in computer management, but they “know” what needs to be done. We are doomed.
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July 27, 2011 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
The QA Director literally tried to take over management of the project by telling the teams how they should develop the product. This was all done under the guise of quality assurance. It became simply bad project management.
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July 25, 2011 Bruce Benson
Quality
3 Comments
A good budget is often the output of fixing other parts of the project management process such as project planning and schedule estimating.
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July 20, 2011 Bruce Benson
Cost
I've always been fascinated by how projects and organizations populated by a lot of smart people often just didn't do well. I spent 20 years in the Air Force followed by just over 10 years in the corporate world. There was an unsettling management consistency between these two worlds. I've come to call it the "A" Student Syndrome.
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July 13, 2011 Bruce Benson
Team Management
13 Comments
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
1 Comment
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. Another variation is that if we just didn’t have any problems our projects would all be on time, on budget and unqualified successes!
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May 10, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
4 Comments
