Archive for category The Project Manager
Motivate me
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on March 2nd, 2007
We’ve all heard the speeches at some point. You know, the ones your manager flings around to help you get motivated for whatever crap you have to deal with. Motivation in the workplace is a big thing. I get it, I really do. With it people perform better, deliver more value, blah blah blah.
But how do you motivate people? Not being a particularly people-oriented person myself it takes quite a bit of effort. I find it difficult to relate the “classroom” teaching of motivational speakers to actual workplace situations. There’s help out there however. Taking the things backwards may prove to be a helpful way of looking at things.
Just today my boss came up to me to share his latest find: despair.com. The site made its name through a series of De-Motivation posters and a management book, “The Art of Demotivation“. Flipping through the site’s pages - and especially the videos in the Spin section - proves to be a helpful reminder of how some things you see every day are just plain wrong. I highly recommend the one on “Addressing Employee Complaints“.
The future tense of “I give”
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on August 17th, 2006
In a concious effort to improve my influencing skills recently began reading a book on it by R. Cialdini. I’ve found it to not only to be an informative but also a very entertaining read. The examples for the psychological tools used are vivid, to the point and quite frankly amusing.
One particular part which I liked was regarding Reciprocation - a concept stating that we try to repay in kind, what another person has provided us. To illustrate the pervasiveness of this rule an illustration was given regarding a fifth grader. When asked to give the future tense of “I give”. His response was “I take”.
Job description
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on July 11th, 2006
When your boss sends you a mail titled “is this our role…” with the enclosed picture you gotta wonder: are we on the right path?
I for one find it a wonderful illustration as it reminds me of the dangers of managing a project without the proper level of authority. I am left to ponder if this is what a project manager is reduced to if he fails to obtain the necessary authority, through a charter or the equivalent, to apply oganizational resources to project activities.
PM: What do I do all day?
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on November 30th, 2005
Or rather what do I whish I was doing all day. There’s a nice White Paper over at Comprehensive Solutions explaining - in layman’s terms - what a Project Manager actually is and could be expected to do.
Just in case you wondered…
PM: Project Initiation
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on November 30th, 2005
I just ran across a series of articles about project initiation published by the Scitor Corporation. The articles are PMI oriented. For someonewho’s been trained on PRINCE2 - like me - it’s a good exercise in thinking as it opens up new avenues of thought.
- Part One: Getting Started
- Part Two: Project Strategies
- Part Three: Stakeholders & Organizations
- Part Four: Project Frameworks
- Part Five: Project Milestone Schedules
I take it for what it’s worth: food for thought.
The expensive part
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on November 19th, 2005
In the 4 years since I started working on software projects I noticed one recurring theme with developers. Minor details such as documentation, error-handling, editing of user inputs, and testing are so boring that they don’t count! This somehow reflects my very first projects - you know the ones where your boss says: “hey I need this and that” - which I naively equated with 3 major tasks: defining the requirements, getting it developed and dumping it on a server somewhere
I’ve wisened up since then, have the developers?
Death March
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on November 19th, 2005
Currently on my reading list:
Death Marches: A death march project is one for which an unbiased, objective risk assessment (which includes an assessment of technical risks, personnel risks, legal risks, political risks, etc.) determines that the likelihood of failure is [larger than] 50 percent.
A funny quote from chapter 1:
“Corporate insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and each time expecting different results.” - email from Richard Sargent to Ed Yourdon Jun 24, 1996
PM Reading
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on October 25th, 2005
While browsing for some support doc over at books24×7 I came across the following title:
I didn’t have time to read through the whole thing but found the part that I read on defning a functional manager’s role quite helpful. Unlike many PM books that I’ve read so far this one actually bothers to take the focus away from the PM role and explains the constraints under which the functional manager works and thus how this may influence his relation to the project.
Get them requirements
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on October 15th, 2005
Speaking about requirements gathering recently someone had a realy nice metaphor for a difficult - if not unwilling - customer’s way of stalling a project.
PM: What temperature would you like the water to be?
Cust.: It’s too cold.
PM: What about now, is that better?
Cust.: Still won’t do.
PM: It would really help if you could tell me what temperature you needed it at.
Cust.: No can do but it’s defenitly too hot. Perhaps if you changed the fosset…
I’d take out the needle and have him sign his requirements with blood but he would later deny its his just to slow us down some more.
Developing Leadership
Posted by Thomas in The Project Manager on October 10th, 2005
Sometime ago I went on a management development programme. One of the topics we covered was “managing ambiguity”. What I took away from the subject was that it was the leader’s responsibility to manage the ambiguity, not his people’s. Hence his communication should be clear and unequivocal so as to ensure the team is aligned and no ambiguity is left for them to struggle with.
A sharp reminder of what to was brought to my attention a couple of days ago. This is what was said to a team of individual contributors by a director
[...] our “Operate Independently collectively” strategy is still [...]
You just have to love the managment speak.
Update:I’ve found the origninal text he was referring to! Just to show how things get distilled as it gets passed down the chain:
Operate independently, Compete collectively, Manage collaboratively.