PMcrunch

I am a proponent of "breadth of experience".  I believe that anything you know can only help, and cannot hurt you.  I believe that every experience is worth something, and that’s why you should endeavor to make the most out of everything you do.  I believe that whatever you do comes back to you in [...]

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In our increasingly matrixed world, the job of the project manager does not always involve having complete control of project resources – requiring some unique skills.

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Often it is hard to decide to what to do first, or what to do next. In fact, in my experience, it is often easier to make such decisions on large projects than smaller projects. The Theory of Constraints is a neat concept that can help.

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I typically find change to be refreshing, but also find that it is not always possible. I also find that I have great admiration for those who can maintain a fresh and consistent outlook all of the time. They can be at the top of their games all of the time – and not necessarily incorporate that same type of change component that I do.

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Looking at lessons learned from the current economic crisis, one that stands out pertains to how people are incentivized in business. Banks with risky loan portfolios somewhere along the line had incentivized their people to fill their portofolios with these loans. Somewhere along the line, the incentives did not incorporate some of the risks involved. How does this play out in project and program management?

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Depending on your environment, you may have some team members that seem like non-contributors, and in some ways actually get in the way. While I have never experienced this – or at least not for long – on the smaller more critical projects I have managed, I do see this on larger more matrix-oriented projects. The question is, “How can I handle this?”

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I have found the practice of having an “ADMIN DAY” is a great valuable and necessary one. But what is “ADMIN DAY”? How does it work and how does it provide value?

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In most situations on projects, failure simply is not an option. The project or program must succeed one way or another. We need to grapple with whether to do the project on one level; but once that decision has been made, it needs to be executed successfully.

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These tough times are different from past recessions in that “visibility is low”. What I mean by that is that it is not just a matter of seeing that sales had declined a certain amount, or that certain costs had reached a certain amount; it is not just that there is a general slimming or pruning of weaker competitors across the board. The problem is that it is very hard to predict with any reasonable level of certainty what is going to happen next and, thus, we find ourselves driving through our challenges “with low visibility”.

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FMEA is an important lean Six Sigma technique that has potential to be used in project management. While in Six Sigma it needs to be used at a very rigorous way, there certainly is some room for flexibility when used in project management. In either case, it is a good structured technique for analyzing problems and identifying solutions.

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