My staff have heard me use the expression all too often. “Tail wags dog! Film at 11.” As though it were a breaking news headline on CNN. I use the expression though to talk about organizations that approach our company with an interest in deploying our enterprise timesheet system or an enterprise project management system but have somehow gotten the cart ahead of the horse (Yes, I know. It’s another expression). The conversation usually starts…
Perhaps you’ve heard the proverb “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The expression can be traced back to a novel from the early 1800’s called Mrs. Dymond but the sentiment of the expression is understood by everyone. If you do something for someone else that’s a good thing but teaching them to do it for themselves is a much greater…
Many years ago I was forced to take an Economics Statistics course at McGill University in Montreal. It was a requirement for my Economics Major and one of the most miserably tough math classes I’d ever encountered. The class was taught by an older gentleman who was maybe 150 or maybe 160 years of age. He had tenure, he immediately informed us so there was no one we could complain to when he would fail…
I’m very proud to announce that I have joined the ProjectWorld*Business Analyst World Orlando Advisory Board as we work together to bring Project World Business Analyst World to Orlando in 2017! I’m working with new friends on the board and old friends at Diversified who organize the Project World conferences around the world. My association with ProjectWorld goes back to its inception in Toronto 20 years ago so this opportunity to bring ProjectWorld*Business Analyst World to a new…
There I am at the PMI 2016 Global Congress in San Diego listening to keynote speaker Sue Gardner. Ms. Gardner’s resume is enough to make you pause and take notice. She has worked with numerous Silicon Valley companies including Wikimedia who run the famous Wikipedia. She has been on Fortune Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful Women list and that alone is saying quite a bit. So, I was interested to hear her views on the future…
As I mentioned here in the blog earlier this year, I will be speaking next week in San Diego at the prestigious Project Management Institute’s Global Congress North America. On Tuesday, September 27 at 9am I’ll be presenting a paper called “Just call me Trim Tab” discussing the lessons project managers can learn from famed futurist Buckminster Fuller. If you are going to the Global Congress and would like to talk to me in person, please…
For those of you who attended my session on Setting Project Business Priorities in the Minnesota PMI’s Professional Development Days conference this week, you may be interested in the link I promised. Here is the link to the Pairwise comparison spreadsheet we used in today’s exercise: www.epmguidance.com/resources/Pairwise_Comparision_Exercise.xls. Once again, thanks to everyone who attended today.
Next week I’ll have the pleasure of visiting the Minneapolis/St-Paul area to speak at the Minnesota chapter of the PMI as they host their Professional Development Days event. I’ve been asked to speak on two subjects and I’m only too happy to do so. On Wednesday, September 14th I’ll be talking about Creating Business Prioritization for Projects and Portfolios where we’ll discuss how creating priorities for our projects is more about understanding our business imperatives than it is…
At my firm, HMS Software, we were delighted to launch the latest new version of TimeControl this week. TimeControl 7 was released on Monday and there’s no one happier about that than I am. I’m excited about the new release but it sparks a conversation in my firm and with people in my industry about how often should clients go between software versions. There’s several aspects to the conversation. What is a “new version”? The…
In project management, that last 1% before you can say. “We’re really complete now… Honest!” can be a long leap from 99%. I’ve talked about the Ivory Snow project syndrome before where the project becomes almost instantly 99.4 percent complete and then stays there the rest of its life. That’s a condition that often happens in the heady heyday of the early phase of a project. There’s another more sinister scenario when you’re near the…