Newsletter Archive

When the decisions get difficult, do you have a tool?

Is a business downturn a time for project leaders to keep a low profile or a time for fundamental changes?

Is a Business Plan Really a Plan?
Is your company's business plan actually a plan that will help your business succeed?

How Personal a Plan?
People often ask how planning should relate to things outside of work. Here are some ideas to help with that.

End Date Not?
What if a project does not have an end date. Is it actually a project?

Long Cycles
Are we so dedicated to the power of the 24/7 workplace that we forget that some deliverables require time? I think so. Here are some ideas about a few deliverables that take more than a quick run-through.

On The Importance of Getting Ready
Most project managers believe that getting ready is important, but what are the three most important parts?

Scaled Process
This article talks about the mismatch of process and project and gives some ideas on how to reduce the impact of a process that is less than optimal for the project.

Design Build
The plan is to figure it out as you go, invent it on the fly, to be flexible and meet the needs without all that ‘formality’ stuff. But what about a plan?

Managing Your Inbox
Taking your inbox to zero every day sounds almost impossible, but if you are going to keep your priorities straight, its almost required and its not as hard as you think.

The Techno Leash
How available do you need to be to your project team. Is it every minute, hour, day, or week?

Virtual Resistance
People sometimes resist doing what is asked of them. In this article we look at passive-aggressive behavior, how it impacts projects, how email practices facilitate it, and how you can start changing this behavior in your team.

How Email Causes Meetings
People have complained about meetings for years. Now email has joined meetings as worker's least favorite activities. What email has added to the mix is that bad email practices actually cause more meetings to occur. Additionally, meetings are now taking on the same bad practices as email. Here is how, why, and what to do about it.

Control of High Performance Internetworked Teams
Control in traditional project teams has its limits - and those limits are being stretched everyday by fast moving markets, 24/7 workweeks, and projects that span multiple time zones. Here are ideas about effective controls in today's fast-moving Internetworked teams.

Traditional Project Controls
Control in traditional organizations has its limits - and those limits are being stretched everyday by fast moving markets, 24/7 workweeks, and projects that span multiple time zones. Here starts a view of the current reality as a lead-in to how control is played out within Internetworked organizations.

Project EQ
One of the more interesting views for building stronger leaders is buried behind a name that stops many technical people cold. Yet it presents valuable insights that can help with both personal and team performance. Take a look at this new dimension in style.

Planning Season
Are you in the middle of planning for next year? Have a look at our take on Planning Season.

Micromanagement
What is it really, and what is your limit? In this article we propose when it is appropriate and when it can kill an organization.

Working 'IN' Versus 'ON'
Lately I've had many conversations about clients needing to work ‘on’ their business in addition to their daily work ‘in’ their business. It's more of a challenge than it sounds - for larger or smaller businesses.

Customs Lost
Working relationships are the basis of successful projects. But when the team is distributed, we give up much of what we know works.

Is Your Plan or Team the Problem?
You can’t deliver a project with just a plan and no team; however, you can deliver a project with a team and no plan. While project managers everywhere would like to believe otherwise, it actually happens all the time. Plan and team are inseparable concepts – the challenge is that the two are generally dealt with separately: during a project they should be dealt with as one. It is often the mismatch between the two that frustrates leaders and troubles projects.

Complexity
At some level, we all like to keep things simple. But at the same time we continually drive our businesses and our lives to ever increasing complexity. You need to simplify your communications, simplify your product lines, and simplify your processes in order to get the best possible results from your project investments.

Fixing the Old Stuff
One of the many problems in need of new ideas is how to enhance old software to make it young, feature-current, and maintainable. One of these processes is called Refactoring. It sounds like an answer to the challenges of old software.

Three Immutable Laws of Risk Management
Risk management is a grand notion and helps those that practice it. Unfortunately there are three major roadblocks that prevent most businesses and governments from implementing risk management.

Personal Planning
Paper is back, PDAs are losing ground. Here are ideas about two great ways to restore order in your personal space.

Best Supporting Roles
Virtual workspaces, blogs, wikis and archives can become the lifeblood of larger self-organized project teams, for which all-inclusive, continuous information sharing is a founding principle. Meanwhile, the author recommends that email take a backseat on project communication.

Just in Case or Just in Time?
Contingencies, padding, and conservatism all have their place. But when I hear people say "I've made every schedule and commitment for every project I've ever led" my ears perk up and I think about conservatism run amok.

Organize Thyself
This installment of our series in Projects at Work magazine looks at how the Hub and Spoke model that has been previously discussed evolves into Self-Organizing teams. While self organizing may sound chaotic, it is actually the basis of most successful teams - as members of those teams both collectively and individually take on project responsibility. Yes there is still a strong (perhaps stronger) need for Project Management and Project Leadership, but the roles are not the Command-and-Control project dictators of the 20th century. Self-Organizing Teams are the force of today.

Project Stories
Do your project leaders tell stories about their projects? Do they help? Here are some ideas about the importance and telling pf project stories.

Careers and Relationships
I hear frequent debate about the value of project training certificates versus the power of experience and good connections. Here are some ideas about the value of each and some ideas about how to leverage all of your background and connections.

The Quick Look
Sometimes you need to assess a project team in a short time. Here are the first things we look at.

Seed Corn
While job loses due to offshore projects can be devastating, the long term affect is worse.

Bygone Heroes
'Heroic' leaders thrive on power and hierarchy. Their need to control can throttle communication and innovation on projects, frustrating teams and slowing progress. What drives heroic leaders, and what can be done about them?

This is the third article in the series on project teams published by Projects@Work. To read this, a free registration is required at their web site.

The Death of Charts
Some companies place great value the org chart. But there is a better way--a networked model--to organize your team. This is the second article in the series on project teams published by Projects@Work. To read this, a free registration is required at the Projects@Work web site.

Enterprise Project Management
Centralization of project management and establishing a project management office are high on the list of many enterprises as they experienced continuing dissatisfaction with their investments in projects, products, and technologies. As in many ongoing challenges, eventually some leaders will want to revert to the command-and-control mentality, but it’s not that simple. A centralist viewpoint is rarely the right answer.

Building Project Teams in the Offshore Environment
This article in Mass High Tech magazine offers ideas on building team for offshore projects.

Failure of Consensus
Why does consensus fail? The most commonly cited reason is cycle time - particularly in organizations where consensus is not well-practiced or supported by the norms of the organization. But sometimes the reason is buried in the transition from command-and-control.

Requirements Undone
Requirements are still the leading cause of project problems. Here are our top three recommendations.

Words Count
Yes, words count, but meaning counts too.

Project Team Diversity
Tom Peters has recently reminded me about the importance of team diversity. While there are many kinds of team diversity that are important, today my topic is cognitive and gender diversity.

Throw it Away – the Psychology of Floor Mats and Software
Everyone will tell you to build a prototype and then throw it away. With mechanical design, it’s done routinely; with electronics, we plan on it. But entire methodologies have been designed to make sure that your software prototype is saved.

Herding
I want to introduce a new word into your project management vocabulary; herding. Herding can happen when all of you best-intentioned team building runs out of control.

Lessons-Learned
A lessons-learned process needs to be supported by a business's culture in order to provide accurate and valuable feedback.

Dimensions of Decisions
In this reprint from People on Projects, we examine the decision process from the perspective of what is required to insure that the requirements of participation, understanding, stakeholders, executives, and the project team are all satisfied.

Customer Partners
One critical decision that a product development team makes is not ‘if’ to work with customers, but how. We look at customer involvement in three degrees: casual, involved, and committed.

Visual Project Thinking
‘Mind Mapping’ is a great visual tool made better since you can transfer project plans between visual maps and Microsoft Project. This provides a quick way to turn requirements into a project design or provide a new way to analyze an existing project.

Arbitrary Decisions
An issue that often gets in the way of selling a decision to a team is the extent to which the decision seems arbitrary rather than the result of reasoned judgment

ROI: The Really Outdated Index
Calculating ROI on projects is a great concept. Unfortunately in practice, it is more likely to harm a business than help it.

Focus Groups
We all need to take every opportunity to make a great impression with our customers. Be especially careful after a focus group.

Team Competencies
Five competencies for teams that have the basics in place. These can turn successful projects into exceptional projects.

Project Analysis
Tools for seasoned project managers running complex projects.

Project Management for Small Companies
Small companies can be quickly overloaded with processes that are well meaning, but designed for large or complex projects in large organizations.

Get My Email?
I don’t know if you received my last email. Unfortunately you have the same problem with emails that you send to your project team.

Building a Roadmap
Building a visual representation of future of products and product lines is a complex, discussion-centric, and long term activity. This idea focuses on how to develop and document the results of that process.

Assuring Training Results
In a down economy, training is often one of the first expenses to be cut. Here are some ideas on how to get the best value for your training investment.

Project Leadership Practices
When we present project or product leadership to groups, we usually ask them about the best and worst practices that they see from their leaders. This article recaps the ones most frequently mentioned.

Project Decision Making
The finesse with which a project team or company makes decisions is an indicator of the potential success of the project and company.

What is Product Development Leadership?
You need product development leadership (PDL). While you may feel that you already have some, let me explain the passion that I feel about what it takes to lead product development.

New Tools
I use the term "tools" to describe the major software and hardware that is used by teams to describe, plan, design, implement, and test during product development. Too often tool investments do not pay back; here are ideas for a better return on your tool investment.

Work of Champions
I have written about Product Champions in several past newsletters. Here are the top-level challenges for the Product Champion.

Not Office Politics!
A look at that causes of politics in product development projects and an approach to keep politics from taking over the project.

Staffing Up
The working environment is largely set by the tone of the people. While there are many guides to selection of personnel, here are four advanced characteristics that I believe are important in selecting an effective team.

Leadership Personalities
The leadership personalities that best run projects change as a project progresses. This is not a unique concept; it can be seen in startups as an entrepreneur has different personality, skills, and temperament than a person running an established business.

Team Communications
Luck notwithstanding, risks ignored will usually come back as less controllable and higher cost events later in the project.

Why Methodology Anyway?
Good and bad reasons for applying methods to your new product development madness.

Metaphors
A powerful way to move beyond user-scenarios is using metaphors for both defining and explaining new products.

Risk First
One of the hardest concepts for project planning is to place the riskiest tasks as early in the project as possible. This is maximizes the time available to recover if there are unexpected issues. So why is it hard? Plenty of reasons.

Golden Moments
"Golden Moments" sounds like such a good thing, but in project planning, Golden Moments are the times when everything has to come together and work, or you loose control of the project. Most people build Golden Moments by accident.

Usability
Usability is one of the most intangible features of a product, but poor usability will overwhelm even the best feature set. This issue contains ideas on how to measure and improve usability.

Killing a Project
Sometimes projects last say beyond when they should be stopped. This issue presents some ideas on how to step up to the decision to stop a project, and some views on why you should not.

Keep it Short
At the earliest stages of product development, the product definition should be short and to the point. Marketing glitz should be second in importance to clarity of benefits, purpose, intent, and principal features. There are two documents that I like to see early in a product development project.

Losing the plan
Two thoughts this month. First, protecting yourself against features and updates that inadvertently damage the plan file, and my perennial favorite, backups.

Collaborate and Deliver
You have the best asynchronous collaboration software, but did your team see the critical message you posted?

Collaboration Opportunities
This issue contains ideas on the different kinds of collaborative applications
you can build for your product or buy for your company’s or team’s use.

Collaboration Basics
This issue starts the development of ideas on how to position your team to both use and provide collaborative tools.

Good Risks
Project leaders take risks. If the risks are too conservative, the project may fail in the marketplace, if too high the project might not finish. Developing and maintaining a balanced project risk portfolio is as important to your projects as it is to your personal investments.

Talking About Risks
Four barriers to communication of risks in projects.

Requirements Risks
In software development there are well-documented statistics about catching defects early in a project and how much cheaper "earlier" is than "later". While I have not found similar statistics on managing risks early in projects, the same is certainly true.