The Nimble PM

I was just doing some research on change management and I had another light bulb moment.  The article I was reading said you needed to make a business case for change, and my immediate gut reaction was “on what planet?  Nobody ever makes a change for the sake of change.”  In my experience most organizations, [...]

How many of you have given this advice to a new PM?  I know I have.  I remember vividly explaining to a fellow consultant the mistakes she made in failing to determine exactly what the client wanted when she started the project and then offering a few techniques that I felt would help her in [...]

I’ve used software package “A” (the product shall remain nameless since this is a personal opinion and not a Gartner MQ type of comment) since the first version came out on windows 3.1.  Originally is was cheap enough that I didn’t mind being a loyal customer and I upgraded faithfully.  Somewhere about 10 years ago [...]

I’m going to be writing a note about packaged Project Management Methods and I thought I’d start out by asking some questions about the decision process many of you use to select your approach toward the adoption of a PM method.  If you’re game to take a short (10 question) survey compliments of survey monkey [...]

One of the topics I had planned to spend more time discussing in 2010 is change management.  I found this quote today that I think offers a nice perspective on one element of change management “It’s called the culture buffer because you have to put effort in to get past it and break through. It’s [...]

woke up this morning thinking about the fact that when I talk to CIOs many (if not most) tell me they know they don’t have the best project managers currently on staff.  My own experience would absolutely confirm this as true so the question is why don’t we fix it? Part of the answer seems [...]

I recently had a few moments to particpate in an email discussion with my collegues.  We were tossing around ideas about how to reduce costs (a topic everyone is focusing on in this day and age) and I found myself putting my finance hat back on and saying — Beware falling into the trap that [...]

I got asked a question about the impact of budget cuts on PPM efforts and through my usual circuitous thought process I ended up wondering if anyone was seeing a significant reduction in the largely unnecessary SOX compliance process that IT has been laboring under. Obviously the above statement is one that some people will disagree [...]

I had a discussion a while ago about whether or not setting a goal to move from a level one maturity to level three in two years was a good idea.  We generally tell clients that level three is a good level to aim for, where everything begins to work well enough to get things [...]

“IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.” Found this quote in a computerworld article a friend sent me (http://tinyurl.com/lm9yb7).  While the entire article is well worth reading this one sentence seemed to pertain to [...]