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Posts tagged "Communication" (Page 4)
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
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
The official project management plan is logically critical to the success of any effort and should be reflected in your project management tools. However, too many organizations keep their plans restricted or hidden for various reasons. This almost always sacrifices focus and productivity. The fifth insight that helped our projects exceed expectations was to have a very visible plan at every stage of planning and execution.
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March 8, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
The official project management plan we are following may not be all that official and may not be the plan our team is following. Getting the official plan and the current plan to be the same and reflected in our project management tools will help vault our project to success. Here are four insights that have made a huge difference in the effectiveness of our plans.
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March 4, 2010 Bruce Benson
Planning
Balance using your messaging (e-mail, texting, voice mail, etc.) project management tools with talking one-on-one to key people, but beware of overdoing it when talking in person.
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November 30, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication
My article on e-mail infoglut resulted in a pointer from DoddsSimon to Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann. Merlin takes classic time management ideas and applies them to e-mail. One notion he presents is that much of your e-mail becomes "dead skeletal husks" and can be thrown away. I'm going to suggest instead that your "old" e-mail can be a great project management tool.
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November 24, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication, Time Management
IEEE Spectrum ran an article on "Infoglut" in October 2009. The article was light on specific techniques to manage "Infoglut", so here are five related to e-mail that I've found useful for the project manager, or any manager for that matter.
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November 20, 2009 Bruce Benson
Time Management
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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November 12, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication
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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November 3, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication, Reporting
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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October 29, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication, Reporting
Your test organization will often provide the first indicator that you’ve improved how you do business. How this shows up however, might be rather different than you would expect. Test organizations do not always handle it well when quality improves.
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September 24, 2009 Bruce Benson
Testing
Get out of sync with what everyone else is doing. When our project is not succeeding and we keep doing what was done in the past, we are going to get the same results. The path to improvement often means being disruptive.
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September 7, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
If we want a successful project, we may want to develop it remotely, so it is away from the chaos of the main office.
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August 30, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication, Reporting
Some successful managers, line managers -- not just project managers, may have never experienced a successful project. A few days after I originally wrote this, I came across an on-line discussion by some senior managers that just illustrated this surprising situation so well.
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August 13, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
What you say and how you say it may have more impact than you expect. Communicating is one of your key project management tools. Just be sure you do speak up and be reasonably persistent in getting your ideas out to the team.
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August 9, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication
