Conditions for “organized emergence”

Emmanuel Gobillot commented on my post on self-organization (here).  I liked his comment so much that I thought it was worth highlighting below: I have found four conditions which need to be in place for communities to be productive.  I called these Simplicity (a coherent and simple way to engage), Narrative (an underpinning story for [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Confucius

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. 

Using SCRUM with ASAP

Ron Stanton sent me a mail asking how SCRUM works with our implementation methodology — ASAP for Implementation. While SAP does have a SCRUM methodology that we use — SAPScrum — it is an internal approach used for solution development.  SAPScrum is pretty straight SCRUM, so there’s no mystery to it. We just started a [...]

Goals and the limits of self-organization

Thought-provoking post by Jurgen Appelo on the teleology of software projects (post here, check the perceptive comments too).  More properly, he points out that projects do not have a goal in and of themselves.  In his words, they don’t have intrinsic goals (other than self-preservation). For me, this insight points to the limits of self-organization in [...]

Correlation and Causation

Math class is tough!

PM Quote of the Day — Carolyn Wells

Actions lie louder than words. 

Two piles: things to care about…or not

Scott Berkun has had a few recent posts that every new leader should read. The first is here: How project managers establish power.  In this post, Scott highlights one of the most important things to do as a leader –  help your teams and their leaders clear away the clutter: He gave me clear priorities…. It [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Rosa Parks

I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear. 

Well, approach “x” worked for me when I worked at company “y”

Pawel Brodzinski had a wise corollary for my original post on naysayers (here).  He puts it well… The distance between rejecting things you don’t believe in and forcing others to do things you believe in is pretty short. It is great to bring a successful practice to a new situation, but one had better be [...]

Closing up the PM “professional” survey

I’m trying to tie up some loose ends, especially follow-ups promised in earlier blog posts (here).  In particular, here are the top two answers from the “Is Project Management a Profession Yet?” survey (survey here): 38 percent: Yes, but second-tier — like engineering or non-university teaching (33 of 86 answers) 26 percent: No, not yet [...]