Why I left SAP…”macro” negatives

Second-guessing oneself is a risk when deciding to leave a leading company, so I needed to ensure that I had no regrets when I left SAP.   In particular,  I didn’t want short-term personal or “micro” stumbling blocks to obscure great “macro” opportunities in the rest of SAP.  Unfortunately, there were too many big picture concerns that nagged at [...]

PM Quote of the Day — George Canning

But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save me, oh, save me, from the candid friend! 

PM Quote of the Day — Jane Austen

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible. 

PM Quote of the Day — Carolyn Wells

Actions lie louder than words. 

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 ready to [...]

I’ve never seen “solution y” successfully implemented…

There are some assertions — or maybe I should say incantations — about process or solution failures that never cease to puzzle me. One of my favorites is:
In my “x” years of experience, I’ve never seen “solution y” successfully implemented…
I’ve heard this about TQM, activity-based costing, Six Sigma, SAP, Oracle, Java, etc., and ad nauseum. [...]

Deliverables, work packages, and the schedule

This temptation to fix a schedule and get to work is constant in enterprise IT.  It is particularly alluring for any application tied to a SOX-compliant landscape — some governance models only allow two opportunities/year to deliver – where project durations strongly suggest themselves and time is always “a-wasting”.
Of course, as Glen Alleman reminds us here, starting with the schedule  [...]

Bridging the PM/Management Gap

I like the title of Sanjay Saini’s post on the lack of communication between project managers and senior management — “Make the Effort.” One can quibble with his specific suggestions, but his exhortation to communication more regularly, frequently,and transparently is right on:
Reviewing progress and profitability should not be something that waits until year’s end. [...]

Culture-Driven Complexity

Peter Thomas’s recent comment (here) and his post on developing an international BI strategy (here), reminded me that I had forgotten to post on some interesting dimensions of project and project complexity.  Or at least they’re interesting to me…
This PDF outlines some of the complexity that culture introduces to managing global projects.   It’s nothing revolutionary, but [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Sara Jeanette Duncan

If you have anything to tell me of importance, for God’s sake begin at the end.