I’m very excited to be in Dallas this week to speak in person at the 15th Annual University of Texas Dallas Project Management Symposium. This is a great event every year and I couldn’t be happier to have been asked to speak. My topic is: Is the Era of the Project Management Office at an End? Which I’ll be presenting on Tuesday, May 23rd. If you will there, please say hi!
When under pressure, we all tend to retreat to that which is familiar. That’s not just in project management. It’s true everywhere. I’ve been studying a bit of Abraham Maslow thanks to some other ideas I’ve been working on associated to Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. In 1966, he was quoted in the Psychology of Science as saying “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as…
I’m very excited to be in Dallas next week to speak in person at the 14th Annual University of Texas Dallas Project Management Symposium. This is a prestigious event and I couldn’t be happier to have been asked to speak. My topic is: The Pyramid of Project and Resource Management which I’ll be presenting on May 18th. If you will be at the conference, please make sure to say hello!
In our business we are often asked if data from one system can be integrated to another. There’s almost a pull for people to say “If I can integrate it, I must”. That’s just not true. Let’s look at an example where integrating might cause a negative impact. Years ago I was asked if I could integrate project scheduling data with Outlook. “Look,” said the client who was an IT specialist, “Outlook task data…
I have a mobile phone from Verizon. One day, soon after I’d upgraded my phone, it chirped in the car. “Your Verizon team is ready for you,” it said. I was unnerved. What did they mean? Why are they saying that? Then, I looked up and saw that I was stopped at a red light outside a Verizon store. I was somewhat stunned for a few minutes as I took in this new level of…
Is it harder to deploy an enterprise system when you aren’t co-located? Of course. But, it is much more common than you might think. If we think of deploying a system to a small business where everyone is in the same building, then communicating and encouraging use of the new system is easy to imagine. As the new system is designed and configured, the people doing that work are walking along the same corridor as…
As expected, I have more changes to report on speaking engagements that I had been asked to speak at have been postponed or changed. The ProjectWorld / Business Analyst World show scheduled for late May in Toronto been rescheduled to December 14-17. My talk there will be rescheduled to somewhere within those dates.
In the EPM industry we tend to talk about Enterprise without much consideration that it may be considered differently by different people or at different times. Many people think of an enterprise as something that applies only to large multi-national publicly traded companies. Others might think of an enterprise as a broad collection of organizations or companies. This is one of the first questions I ask when speaking to an organization who is interested in…
If projects were always predicable we wouldn’t need project managers. We’d just authorize the project based on what estimators had determined and then on the expected finish date, we’d pick up the completed project with the actual costs exactly meeting the projected costs. Sadly, that’s not the case. The work of project managers is so important because life is so unpredictable. In the face of almost everything challenging in our world, we have come to…
Resource management is a subject that I lecture on often and, perhaps more interestingly, is a popular topic. You might think that after all these years of the promotion of project management practices and tools that resource management would be an old and tired subject but apparently not so much. What is it that has solving resource management challenges be so difficult? The first and most obvious answer is that we don’t all mean the…
