It only takes one key item to make a day successful. Often for me it is a well written e-mail that outlines a problem and drives a set of actions. As busy as the rest of the day may be, this one item makes the day a success and often, if it was insightful enough, makes days or weeks successful.
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August 31, 2010 Bruce Benson
Time Management
I had a job interview for VP of Development. The interviewing VP with a long history in the industry asked me a simple question: Did I think software development was a repeatable process? I said yes. I won't describe the ensuing discussion except to say I didn't get the job. We didn't even get to talk about project management tools!
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August 23, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
That’s the ticket. Let’s get a great project management tool that will help us get everything done faster. We’ll complete all our projects quicker and finally deliver more of them on time! Not so fast young Jedi apprentice ....
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August 17, 2010 Bruce Benson
Change Management
As a project manager we have our own project and often have to fight to keep resources and schedules running right. So what do we do when that other project manger comes requesting our resources? Do everything we can to help them out.
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August 9, 2010 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
Just about every organization has projects or pockets of people doing exceptional work - with or without sophisticated project management tools. Here is one approach that has helped ensure we didn't squash these efforts as we further improved project management in the organization.
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August 3, 2010 Bruce Benson
Change Management
We certainly would not sell off the fairytale Golden Goose to pay for today’s meal. We would find a way to eat today or go hungry and keep the Golden Goose until she laid that next Gold egg. Yet, too often we ignore each project management tool Golden Goose as it comes along.
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July 20, 2010 Bruce Benson
Change Management
We had a crisis. Another project had an emergency so we were losing a significant portion of our engineering staff to go work on that project. We had to act now!
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July 13, 2010 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
Initiative as a project management tool is one of those double-edged swords. We often must take the initiative when we lead a project. But what about initiatives that appear insubordinate? Sometimes it is a project management risk worth taking.
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July 6, 2010 Bruce Benson
Risk Management
It is a big deal today. Project management tools to get people together. Crowd source. Wisdom of the crowds. Even in the Agile Manifesto: "individuals and interactions over processes and tools." Hogwash!
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June 28, 2010 Bruce Benson
Communication
Objective project management tools are something we all look for. However, too often the move to become fully objective results in a loss of insights while we are trying to figure out how to become analytical. Here are a few "gut" insights that have helped us avoid this problem.
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June 22, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
There is great comfort in trying to know every detail so that we as managers can make sure everything goes right. This desire for working out all the details, using project management tools, instead often results in detail overload that obscures the most important aspects of the project. Instead, there is an often simpler approach that works surprisingly well.
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June 15, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
There are many techniques for improving project management in your organization. There are many newer technologies and project management tools that can replace your existing technologies. Why these help is not always because they are inherently better or improved over what you had before. Often, it is just the key act of changing in an orderly and well thought out manner that makes the huge difference.
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June 7, 2010 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Benson's Bylaw: People will work at a quality deficit if given insufficient time.
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May 24, 2010 Bruce Benson
Schedule
Agile. That's it. Agile. The perfect project management tool or methodology. You can use it in general project management. You can use it in software project management. Don't Google it as you will get confusing things like Agile project management and Scrum. You just want to be agile. Look it up in the dictionary. That is a much better source for the methodology.
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May 17, 2010 Bruce Benson
Change Management
We've seen project reports where the team bragged "and we finished early!" Kind of like it was a badge of honor or something. Here are three good reasons we've found for not wanting to finish a project or task early.
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May 3, 2010 Bruce Benson
Schedule
