Search this site
FREE NEWSLETTER
Get Connected
-
Recent Posts
Tags
adult underachiever business writing calling career career coaching Career Management China Dan Ariely Decision-making decisions Democracy elliott jaques emotions Evangelicals Francis Fukuyama Glacier Metal Company happiness Hidden High Potentials high potentials India job job hunting jobs leadership levels of work Lord Acton management naming organizational design podcast positive emotions positivity purpose requisite organization stratified systems theory success Transitions trust underachiever Underachievers unemployment vocation Warren Kinston Wilfred Brown work levelsCategories
LinkedIn
NOTICES
Forrest Christian, consultant with The Manasclerk Company, is the author of most of these pages. Unless noted otherwise as written by another author, all of this site's content is Copyright 2002-2010 E. Forrest Christian, Valparaiso, Indiana, USA. All Rights reserved.
Category Archives: Project Management
The Powerful Are Lousy Planners
The University of Kent is reporting a forthcoming research article by UK social psychologist Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London on how feeling powerful affects one’s estimates. The more people felt powerful, the more optimistic their completion…
Posted in Project Management, Reviews - Articles
Leave a comment
Does Cost Determine Value?
Just because you got me to spend $65M on a project doesn’t mean that its value isn’t a tenth of that. Costs do not determine value but can determine the value of replacement. Continue reading
Posted in Project Management
4 Comments
Project Management vs. Getting Something Done
When Project Management goes sour, it does so because it becomes more about completing the items on the list rather than accomplishing the end goal. Software engineers have made this such a regular lament that you have to believe it has entered into folklore as a song cycle. Continue reading
Posted in Project Management
Leave a comment
Gordon’s Comments on Professional Firms and Requisite Ordering
Some time ago, Gordon had an interesting comment about a couple of posts (see “Getting Work Done at the Right Level” and “Ready, Fire, Aim”: Intuition, Analysis and Tacit vs. Explicit Knowledge
). I wanted to finally get around…
Posted in Managing, Project Management, Theory
3 Comments
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning… and project planning, too
Mintzberg makes some scathing remarks about the Strategic Planning industry. A lot of it seems to come down that the planners are (A) taking the power away from managers and (B) it doesn’t work in practice. I’m wondering if a similar argument can’t be made about software project management. Continue reading
Posted in Computers/IT, Project Management, Reviews - Books, Strategy
1 Comment
Some Change Management articles
When I did the work for CSC, I boned up on these issues because I knew absolutely nothing. I actually read all of this so that I could put together a working change control process for the IT environment. Really.…
Posted in Project Management
Leave a comment
Start with opinions
I hope that this citation is correct. I think this comes from Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive (1967):
Most books on decision making tell the reader: “First find the facts.” But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not
…
Posted in Project Management
1 Comment
Project Portfollios and Complexity
In Waltzing With Bears (a book on IT project risk management, not a manual for circuses), Lister and DeMarco describe the benefits of running IT projects as a portfolio. Not every one of them would have to succeed: you could…
Determining IT Project Complexity
How do I consult to a non-Requisite Organization, one whose very organizational structure means that they will not succeed at this change? I can’t in good conscience tell them that whatever I suggest will have much of an effect on their performance as a group. Continue reading
Posted in Computers/IT, Project Management
2 Comments
RO and Project Costing and Staffing
I don’t think that I am going out on a limb when I say that short time horizons of project managers, sponsors and planners is the leading cause to the disastrous failure rate of IT projects… As Michelle says, “you want a consultant whose current capability at least equals that called for by the entire project, not just the time span of the planning phase.”" Continue reading
Posted in Computers/IT, Project Management, Risk Management
2 Comments
Using TSD to Cost Consulting
The issue of how to price consulting services perennially agitates IT consulting companies. The issue of market price never quite seems to fulfill the need: what a client will bear is often as close to free as they can get.…
Posted in Managing, Project Management
5 Comments
Risk Taking and Software Project Management
Since IT projects are particularly prone to ignoring risk and escalation of commitment, reviewing some of the research on how we make decisions will benefit any IT manager or PM. Continue reading
The Abilene Paradox of Escalation
I’ve been reading a bit on escalation of commitment to a failing cause in IT projects, where a company continues to spend money on a project that is slipping (Denver International Airport’s baggage-handling fiasco) or has shown market failure (the…
Posted in Project Management
6 Comments
De-escalation of Commitment to Projects
There is a large body of work dealing with the escalation of commitment in IT projects, how managers continue to throw good money after bad, increasing their commitment to a project that has little chance of succeeding. For example, Gustavo…
Rules for Organizing for Project Success
Even though they are continuing to spend millions every year, the project has almost no chance of success for entirely organizational reasons. Continue reading
Posted in Project Management
Leave a comment
Project Management Methodologists vs. Theorists
Scott Withrow writes Builder.com’s application developer management newsletter and this week has tackled “Selecting a Project Manager”. While he is speaking of specifically ones for software development projects, his thoughts could represent the thinking of a range of business…
Posted in Project Management
Leave a comment
CMM in uncertain environments, ACM 46(8)
Zhou Zhiying, “CCM In Uncertain Environments”, Communications of the ACM, 46(8), pp. 115 – 119 (August 2003).
ACM has done the industry another great service in the publication of this arcticle. Zhou, professor at the Tsinghua University in Beijing,…
Why IT Projects Fail, part 2
- Risk management is not part of our vocabulary. We want people who are optimistic, not trying to find reasons why something will fail.
- IT does not understand that the change that they are introducing is very disruptive. Of course,
…
Posted in Project Management
Leave a comment
Why IT Projects Fail, part 1
Right person, wrong job
We all too often ask people with little talent for managing projects and clients to do just that. We see those who have a great technical vision and expect them to also have the skills that…
Posted in Computers/IT, Project Management
Leave a comment
Brand’s HOW BUILDINGS LEARN and why can’t software?
In the end, you can’t know what you will need to have at the onset of your project. You can only get the optimized environment after you’ve lived with it and changed it. It follows that you can’t get an optimized environment for tomorrow’s needs until you change it for tomorrow. So, you’ll never be done; you will always need to make adjustments to your environment, or in response to your environment. Continue reading
Posted in Computers/IT, Project Management, Reviews - Books
Leave a comment