Don’t PMs get that they’re “business” people yet?

I saw a somewhat depressing article in this month’s PM Network about the need for project managers to get business-savvy.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what Gary Heerkens writes (the article itself is here).  What saddens me is what this article implies about the mindset of project managers:

Too many project managers don’t see “business understanding” as [...]

BI, Deliverables, and Change Control

This post may court the Business Week curse, but I’m highlighting this story on BI and the recession (here) as the jumping off point for a couple of observations.  Rob T.’s comment in the piece (sorry, but I can’t link directly) notes that:
Unlike ERP, BI can be implemented step-wise, first in targeted, strategic areas, and then [...]

WSJ Interview on “The Experience Trap”

FYI, a Wall Street Journal article (“Dangers of Clinging to Solutions of the Past”) based in part on interviews w/ yours truly came out today (link here, page B4 in the paper).  Thanks to Kishore Sengupta of INSEAD for pointing the WSJ my way and to Phred Dvorak of the WSJ for conveying the perils of [...]

Surviving PMO Success — The Process Maturity Trap

One of the unexpected challenges in our PMO journey has been that success can make an enterprise-level PMO appear less relevant.  A PMO must transform its approach to stakeholders or it won’t take full advantage of the improvements it fostered.  One manifestation of the problem unfolds thusly:

An enterprise PMO composed of PM thought leaders executes a [...]

Leading, not managing, complexity

One of the pleasures of blogging are the parallels I find between and among various bloggers’ themes.  As I was prepping for my WSJ interview last Friday, I reviewed the posts on my Complexity Set page.  I realized that Elizabeth’s review of the book Leadership Skills for Project and Programme Managers (here) provided a nice counterpart [...]

Business Value Game — Prioritizing Requirements

While I haven’t gone through a live simulation of the game, I like a number of the concepts behind The Business Value Game (post here, game here).  Of course, I love learning through simulation (entire Complexity Set here). 
The game also has players assume the role of salespeople who have to prioritize the backlog that developers will have to [...]

Berkun on PMs and Respect

Since I riffed on Manny Ramirez and Theo Epstein earlier (here), let’s continue the baseball metaphor.  Scott Berkun drives a “hanger” a long way when he highlights how PMs sabotage their personal brands (here).  The money quote:
Many PMs unintentionally reinforce this view by trying to get everyone to pay attention to the work they do produce: [...]

Mis-using Management by Exception

Mike Chitty’s post on “Whack a Mole Management” (here) prompted me to think about how I position and coach on management by exception.
Whack-a-mole is an arcade game in which you try to hit ‘moles’ that pop up randomly on a board using a rubber mallet….  Whack-a-mole management is based on the same principles.  The challenges [...]

The squeaky wheel knows it is about to get changed…

Patti Choby has a nice anecdote about change resistance (here). 
A very wise man once said: “Dinosaurs screamed the loudest right before going extinct.”
And so do leaders who fear change….  They create a persona that is “larger than life” and then proceed to create noise, distractions, and even traps designed to neutralize the changes agents in [...]

Conclusions — Avoiding the Experience Trap

NOTE: Finally, I’ve gotten to the 12th (and last) post of a series on an HBR article by Prof. Kishore Sengupta, et al on The Experience Trap.  Below are the summarized conclusions with my comments:

Learning on the job simply won’t work in any but the most basic environments: PMs do not have the time or perspective to [...]