Time Management

Using Hard Facts To Reduce Honesty Buffers

Reducing the project management tool "honesty buffers" is a way to rapidly improve the organization. Much of what I've talked about assumed that we really did know what was going on, and it was more a matter of just delivering the facts than figuring out what the facts are. When we don't yet know the facts, but must report or update senior management, hard facts are often readily available such that we can supply something more concrete than "we don't know yet."
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Change Management, Communication

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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Change Management, Communication, Reporting

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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Change Management, Communication, Reporting Change Management

Project Managing Climate Change And Your Kids On Blog Action Day

While we teach our young the errors of our ways, we need to help them understand that doing what is right is often hard. I tell them that if they don't learn to do better than we did, then their kids will be telling them that the current woes of the world were brought about by their irresponsible actions. They deny it of course, but that is the wonder and optimism of youth.
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Change Management, Personal Practices

It Should Work The First Time

Improving team performance is as much about attitude as it is about using specific project management techniques to improve quality.  Here, "It Should Work The First Time" caught the imagination of the staff and became a cultural and performance changing philosophy
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Change Management Change Management, Schedule

The One Key Step For Successful Improvements

The key step? We have to change something that will actually help us. Here, “test every line of code” made a huge difference in this software organization. This is the first of several articles on basic changes that made a huge difference and why they worked.
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Change Management

The Busiest Project Test Organization Was Also The Best

A busy project test organization can mean your products are having problems. In this case however, the fact they were very busy helped the test organization to stay objective about reporting dramatically improved test results without missing a beat. Other test teams described in this series of articles reacted in inefficient ways when product quality improved dramatically.
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Testing Testing Testing Change Management, Schedule Change Management

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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Communication, Reporting