Thoughts on the Economy
On Monday the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the recession ended in June 2009, 18 months after it began. This has sparked a wave of responses that question the legitimacy of the report, because to many, ‘it sure doesn’t feel like the recession ended’. Steve Chapman with the Chicago Tribune does a good job of clarifying the National Bureau of Economic Research press release. A recession begins when the economy starts shrinking. It ends when the economy stops shrinking and resumes growing -- nothing more. The conclusion doesn't mean we're getting rich. It merely means we're not, as a ...
Colorado Rockies
I know what you’re thinking, ‘What the heck do the Colorado Rockies have to do with project management!?’ Well I’m glad you asked that question, look no further than to our beloved manager, Jim Tracy, for the answer. Robin Hood Syndrome – Take from the Rich and Give to the Poor. As project managers we are often times responsible for managing several concurrent projects, with a static amount of resources that are to be allocated amongst each of these projects. In my project failure blog I mentioned that some projects are doomed from the onset, and how a good project manager will identify these failing projects and ...
Anticipatory Leadership and Time
In my last post we discussed the power of small wins in effecting significant and systemic change. Small wins and trimtabs. Timtabs can turn the QM2 but you have to strategically plan and have the right time to make the turn. The point is anticipatory leadership. Wayne Gretsky is an example of this. Widely regarded as the best hockey player of all time, he fundamentally change the game. He has been asked what made him as great as he was. His response was: "Most players skate to where the puck is. I skate to where it is going to be." Leadership that can ...
Servant Leadership
I was planning on taking the day off from blogging, but I got my first blog request this morning.. time to dust off the old type writer =) Brian Dornsife, MBA, PMP writes: “An interesting topic you might consider blogging about is project leadership. There are obviously many different styles and no one way to be successful, but what is the most effective consistently? When I first came to Octagon, I was a total hard-ass based on my experiences from Dell Computer Corp. I realize today from my experiences here at Octagon and also from my readings (and maybe maturity), a ...
Projects Can Feel Like Turning the Queen Mary 2?
Consider the Queen Mary 2: an ocean liner so vast (QM2 is 147 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall (984 ft.), so heavy (Approximately 151,400 gross tons) and so imposing (QM2's whistle is audible for 10 miles) that it is difficult to see how it could ever be turned. New initiatives and change at the company level, a department level, a project level and often even at a personal level can feel like the QM2 - immovable, vast, heavy and imposing. But just as with the QM2 it takes but a small rudder - a trimtab to - move the ...
Decision Quality
Over the past few years we’ve seen a lot of companies go out of business and a lot of changes in the way surviving companies are doing business. Hind sight is always 20/20 so we might as well use it to see what lessons can be learned from our failures in that past, to foster success in the future. An umbrella statement that could be used to describe the cause of our current economical woes is ‘poor decision making’. A couple years back when gas prices were consistently reaching the $3 and $4 range, it was probably a poor decision by ...
You’re Fired – Episode 1 of The Apprentice
Last night I watched the first episode of this season’s The Apprentice. I must admit, I’ve never gotten into this show before, but really enjoyed it and how relevant it is to our discussions here at EPIC Project Management. I think there are a lot of things we can learn from this show in terms of what NOT to do, I’m serious folks these people don’t know the first thing about project management! As with usual The Apprentice tradition, the teams were split up by gender. The men named their team ‘Octane’, I kept waiting for Tim the Toolman Taylor to jump ...
Project Management Dashboard
The down economy has affected all our personal lives in one way or another, and for those companies that are fortunate enough to still be in business, it has affected the way they do business. One discipline where this is especially true, is project management, because it is directly focused on the management of organizational resources. As resources become more and more scarce, internal competition between project managers for those resources has become prevalent. To maintain stakeholder support of your projects, it’s important to provide useful information regarding the performance of your projects. Yet time and time again, we see projects being managed ...
Building an E.P.I.C.entre for Leadership
epic: adj - to go beyond the ordinary or usual How do you take a project - "beyond the ordinary and usual?" Leadership is the quientessential element. Consider a brief case for the overarching need of leadership and then how the processes of project management supports the exercise of leadership. Let us look then at a cultural shift on the order of the Reformation/Renaissance/Enlightenment. Consider the conditions extant at the time of the Reformation/Renaissance/Enlightenment as shown in the chart below: Category Specific Change Event Communication Printing Press Worldview Copernican Revolution(topples medieval model of the universe) Epistemology Galileo, Newton(questioning epistemology and give rise to modern science) Transportation Sailing Ships(make long voyages/connections possible) Economics Capitalism(replaces Feudalism) Military Technology Guns(lead ...
PMI Articles- Taking Advantage of the Economic Recovery With Project Management May 9, 2012There's been nothing pretty about the economic recession. The business landscape has changed, established companies have disappeared and industries everywhere have been operating in safety mode, trying to avoid risks that would leave them vulnerable. Once known as retail giants, Blockbuster and Borders proved that you have to constantly innovate and be […]
- PMO's Makeover From a Cost Centre to a Profit Centre May 7, 2012In the midst of recession support departments are one of the first casualties of the CFO's cost rationalisation drive. During this mayhem, PMOs struggle to evade the cost cutting knife and are forced to cut back resources and scale down services. The purpose of this article is to outline how PMOs can be successfully transformed into profit centres durin […]
- Creating a Work Breakdown Structure with Microsoft Project May 6, 2012The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a hierarchical decomposition of the project objectives into deliverable-oriented tasks that are executed by the project team to accomplish the overall project goals. The WBS forms the backbone of all the project planning activities. The WBS divides the scope of the project work into smaller, manageable work packages for […]
- Taking Advantage of the Economic Recovery With Project Management May 9, 2012
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