Niall Ferguson had an excellent short column on the financial crisis in this past Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine (here). I liked the piece, especially where Ferguson punctures some of the conventional wisdom about regulation vs. de-regulation.
I appreciated Ferguson’s reminder that we have to be very careful when drawing conclusions, especially when the topic [...]
Filed under: Complexity | Tagged: cognitive biases, financial crisis, New York Times, Niall Ferguson | Leave a Comment »
With the release of SAP Business Suite 7, the debate about the SAP and Oracle integration strategies has heated up. Loraine Lawson at IT Business Edge (here) uses two posts by Ray Wang (here) and Dan Woods (here), to contrast the two approaches.
Of course, I agree with Lawson and Woods that the SAP approach is better [...]
Filed under: Complexity, IT Strategy, IT special interests, Implementation Costs, SAP | Tagged: best-of-breed, Dan Woods, integration, Loraine Lawson, Ray Wang, SAP Business Suite 7 | Leave a Comment »
Glen Alleman and a number of commenters contributed to a great thread on math, PM, and complexity (here).
I try to keep the ideas of complexity “science” in mind when planning strategy and its execution. In particular, I have a deep respect for the power of self-organization and the need to create flexible rather than brittle [...]
Filed under: Complexity, Portfolio Management, Program Management, Project Management, Strategy Management | Tagged: complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, Glen Alleman, Herding Cats | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Filed under: Complexity, Knowledge Management, Organizational Change Management, PMO, People Development, Performance Management, Portfolio Management, Program Management, Project Management, Project Success Factors | Tagged: INSEAD, Kishore Sengupta, Paul Ritchie, Phred Dvorak, The Experience Trap, Wall Street Journal | 1 Comment »
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Filed under: Complexity, Methodology | Tagged: Albert Einstein, parsimony, PM Quote of the Day, simplicity | Leave a Comment »
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
Filed under: Complexity, Methodology | Tagged: Albert Einstein, parsimony, PM Quote of the Day, simplicity | Leave a Comment »
Or maybe I should say “Methodology Scaling/Selection Graphic”… Glen Alleman’s recent post on PM and Agile (here) reminded me to post this picture (click to enlarge) of a slide we use when discussing which methodologies to use for which project. Note that we do not directly oppose “Agile” vs. “Waterfall” in our continuum. Sure, SAPScrum [...]
Filed under: Complexity, Methodology, PMO, Program Management, Project Management | Tagged: agile, agile development, Glen Alleman, Herding Cats, waterfall | Comments Off
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 [...]
Filed under: Communications, Complexity, Globalization | Tagged: cross-cultural communication, culture, Global Delivery, global projects, global teams, Paul Ritchie | Leave a Comment »
I haven’t a chance to dig into the details of SAP Business Suite 7, but it looks very promising w/r/t implementation costs and other TCO drivers. The enhancement package approach was a great start, but the new Business Suite should be a more comprehensive breaking of “the upgrade barrier” (per Ed Toben of Colgate-Palmolive).
Here [...]
Filed under: Complexity, IT Strategy, Implementation Costs, SAP | Tagged: Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP Business Suite 7, TCO, Upgrades | Leave a Comment »
I’m wrapping up this first series about what goes into taking over a new organization (earlier posts (here. here, here, and here). The theme of simplicity and parsimony gets mangled during many discussions; for example, sometimes people think that “simple = easy”. Also, that old simplicity maxim — Occam’s Razor — focuses on analysis to the exclusion of creation [...]
Filed under: Complexity, Leadership, Turnarounds | Tagged: Harvard Business Review, Hernan Saenz, Mark Gottfredson, New Leaders, Occam's Razor, parsimony, simplicity, Steve Schaubert, Succession, William of Ockham | Leave a Comment »
