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 [...]

[Read more →]

I had the pleasure of listening to Ted Fatteross at the PMINJ meeting last night. Although there were many messages throughout Ted’s presentation, one stood out: “Don’t let yourself get too comfortable.”

[Read more →]

I have worked on all kinds of projects.  I’m well aware that project requirements will pit you against limitations of all sorts.  Indeed, we all recognize that we operate in a world of constraints; however, sometimes WE are the biggest constraint of all.   This leads me to the question, “Is your project bigger than yourself?”

[Read more →]

As a program or project manager, one must keep an eye on both the near term and long term.  Today, under tough economic conditions, we typically turn to more near-term thinking because the focus needs to be first on survival before considering future plans.  We need to be careful however to not take this near-term thinking too [...]

[Read more →]

Can you use a 30/60/90 day plan for non-sales jobs? Certainly — it works for engineering, project management, technical support, and many others. For instance, I got a call from a candidate going for a job in Marketing Communications. He had a 30-60-90 day sales plan template, but needed help translating it into a document [...]

[Read more →]

As summer nears, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, thoughts of more time off and vacation occur for most of us. As project and program leaders, it is good, for a moment, to reflect and review our perspective on time off, especially in the current business environment.

[Read more →]

Human resources is an important function in all organizations and that includes the project organization. In these difficult economic times, the human resources’ function is being tested in organizations worldwide. How does that testing in this environment translate into the project team environment?

[Read more →]

Tough challenges demand detailed analysis and affective decision-making. However, almost always it takes time to turn around a bad situation. While we all know that it will take time for the worldwide economic turmoil to iron itself out, recent stock market surges demonstrate and the reaction of investors to those surges illustrate how mindsets can be changed almost overnight.

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

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”.

[Read more →]