What Saturday morning cartoons taught me about project management
(Image credits: Warner Bros. & Chuck Jones) When I was a small child, one of the things I looked forward to every weekend was the chance to watRead More…
Tag: improving project management
Context is critical for learning lessons
Regular readers of my blog will know how much I loathe the term “lessons learned”. I’ve written and spoken frequently about implementation issueRead More…
Psychological safety is not about being nice
Daniel Goleman wrote this week in an HBR article with regards to emotional intelligence: “…one of the most persistent things I see people get wronRead More…
Is a lack of psychological safety preventing you from delegating?
Harvard Business Review published an article by Sabina Nawaz this week on some challenges managers face when they delegate work to their staff. The gaRead More…
It is harder to sell when times get tough!
While there are many cases where we might have to use our powers of influence and persuasion to sell stakeholders on supporting what we feel is the riRead More…
Batches? We don’t need no stinking batches! (Or do we?)
Emphasizing flow through the reduction or elimination of batching of work items is desirable but this is not always efficient or practical. So whaRead More…
Think top-down and bottom-up for agile transformations
A question which I’m asked regularly during my classes is what the best place is to start an agile transformation within a company? Given a choiRead More…
Why project work doesn’t get completed early…
I usually advise my students to encourage their team members to not provide padded work estimates, but rather to make schedule contingencies visible aRead More…
But what will our staff do if we don’t focus on their utilization?
Lean thinking encourages us to focus on maximizing value delivered to stakeholders rather than maximizing the utilization of the people, equipment or Read More…
Securing contingency reserves is the responsible thing to do!
If you have ever taken a course in project management, you may have learned the differences between contingency and management reserves. The former arRead More…