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
I'm a great advocate of managing using objective, data driven, project management tools. I often call it being "brutally honest" but with the insight it is only "brutal" to organizations that have locked themselves into other than objective approaches. Here are five reasons why being objective is hard, and ways we successfully overcame these barriers.
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February 22, 2011 Bruce Benson
Metrics
Sometimes it is the team process and not the project requirements that determines a project's schedule.
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February 15, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
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Make sure we know what it is we do well, and what we don't do well, so we don't discard our best practices when scrambling to stay afloat.
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February 8, 2011 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
We have a temperature sensor that sits outside our bedroom window. My wife says it can't be correct. Why? Because it is up next to the house and the house will warm it. She says the local news temperature report is better. Who is correct?
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February 1, 2011 Bruce Benson
Metrics
Know the history of how our organization has performed in the past.
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January 25, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
It was simple. Submit our request for changes or enhancements to the product. It then goes through a prioritization effort and depending upon where it lands, we get our features or we don’t. That was the process, but few people believed in it. A lot of requested features never got into the product, at least not through this process. Instead, many of our new capabilities were introduced by what could best be described as hostage taking.
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January 11, 2011 Bruce Benson
Requirements Management
There are simple project management tools that allow us to quickly and accurately estimate projects (or tasks) even when we don't have a lot of time to make the estimate nor a lot of details on the effort.
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January 4, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
Is project management quality just a belief? While this notion has merit, I think it can easily lead us down the wrong path.
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December 20, 2010 Bruce Benson
Quality
It was a high level meeting. Lots of VPs. It included our Corporate Chief Quality Officer. He was a big man with a booming voice and was very intimidating to the other VPs.
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December 14, 2010 Bruce Benson
Quality
