Tout your winners

PMOs too often get painted as the dour “project police”.  Our willingness to deliver results without demanding attention and praise is one of the more attractive character traits of project management culture.  But as noted in Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin’s post on The Million-Dollar Question: What’s the Value of a PMO?, delivering results quietly can be a [...]

Innovative innovation myths

Here’s an old column I’ve meant to comment on for a while.  Dan Woods’s Jargon Spy is almost always a good read, and his take on The Myth of Crowdsourcing punctures some of the more cherished notions of social media and its power to create.   He goes right for the granddaddy of them all: Wikipedia [...]

Week 10 Performance Report — Operation Dunk 2010

As you may have guessed by the absence of performance reports, Operation Dunk 2010 was stalled for a bit.  I allowed the demands of work and family to get in the way, but we’re back on the beam.  Luckily, the damage wasn’t too great, as I have remained active.  Weight — Up2.5 lbs from week [...]

Why can’t we plan for leadership?

Glen Alleman asks “Why is it so hard?” and focuses on one of the most difficult line items for IT projects to fund: project/program management, including contract planning and controls.  I’ve had varying success in positioning these resources, so I’m still stumped.  Arguments that worked for one initiative failed for what should have been a similar [...]

Puzzles vs. Mysteries

My in-laws just gave me the latest Malcolm Gladwell book – What the Dog Saw — and I’ve been grazing in it the last few days.  The book is a collection of his New Yorker pieces;  he also includes a few key updates and notes that bring the articles up-to-date. I just finished his piece on [...]

Stop. Look. Listen.

I don’t get over to John Agno’s Coaching Tip blog often enough, though I did make it over the other day and found this timely post: In Stressful Encounters, Rewire Yourself to Listen.  He points out that: In a stressful encounter, you may have less than two minutes to gain control and salvage the situation.  [...]

Another pitfall of the Golden Rule

Long-time Crossderry readers may remember my concerns about the Golden Rule.  Michelle at Mission Minded Management — a blog I just found via The Daily Reviewer — re-states the pitfall of the Rule well here: One of the greatest life lessons anyone can learn is that WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME. When we treat others [...]