Do We Manage Projects By Intuition or by Methodology?
What happens if we are not using a method? What do we call it then? I call it management by intuition. Others call it management by experience. Does this work?
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Home » Posts tagged "Measurement" (Page 5)
Two Steps to Getting Truly Useful Project Management Metrics
One of the hard steps in getting to truly useful project management metrics is to get to a point where the metric tells us something useful and we believe it.
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On-Time Successful Projects? This Year We Can
Projects that consistently complete on time? Gee, we can’t do that. No way ... What? We can?
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Project Managers – Check your Assumptions!
My boss told me my job was to drive down the roughly 500 defects on our current project so we can ship it. I also noticed another 500 issues in the database that were tagged as "work to be done." My boss said to ignore them.
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Too Many Rules Mean Something Is Wrong With Our Project Management
We had the premier project for the organization and we were determined to finally get a product out on-time and with good quality. We did it, and in doing so highlighted how many of our rules were not really helping us to complete a quality project.
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Project Manager It Is Ok To Charge A Customer For Our Services!
This is obvious, yes? If we do work for a customer, we charge them for it. Ok, so the customer would rather get work done for free. It helps their bottom line after all, doesn’t it? Maybe not.
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How Not To Kill Your Project Management Data With Kindness and Best Intentions
It’s a business management problem! Management’s goal should be to figure out a way to facilitate data access. We’ve lost the ability to move quickly. Our approval cycles squash great ideas. We kill with kindness and best intentions.
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Why Change Management Oriented Projects Are Hard and How To Succeed Anyway
Many projects have an S shaped pattern that is our adoption success curve for our effort. Understanding our project adoption and productivity curves will help us ensure our projects are successful.
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How To Project Manage People Who Are Smarter Than You
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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If Quality Assurance Is Project Managing Then We Are In Big Trouble
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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Are Projects Really In Chaos?
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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In Project Management We Are Only Good At What We Spend Our Time On
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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Five Reasons Managing Projects Objectively Is Hard And How To Succeed Anyway
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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Project Management Quality Needs Data Not Beliefs
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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Project Management By Living With Our Data
Knowing our project and organization at a gut level allows us to judge and react both rapidly and with accuracy. Living with data, by being immersed in it -- at least upon occasion, can only help us continue to get better at managing our projects.
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