Diagnosing “Pakled Customer Syndrome”

Please give my brother a hearty welcome to the blogosphere, where he is now shamelessly flaunting his Spargel obsession. 
Stephen’s just getting rolling, but I can’t resist linking to his re-telling of one of my favorite development war stories: Pakled Customer Syndrome.  Star Trek TNG hasn’t aged very well at all — my episode yield is about ten percent [...]

New Poll — Corner Cutting in Project Management

Inspired by a post on Sharp End Training’s blog (here), my post (here), and a comment by PM Hut…
FYI, moved to right sidebar

Cheering up a gloomy project or initiative

I’m curious whether folks have any good stories about humor…I’ve found that a little bit of insanity always helps keep a project or an initiative fun (or at least bearable).  Also, showing that I can laugh at myself is a great way to loosen up the team.
I was on a busy team supporting the wave of [...]

Corner-cutting in Project Management

Elizabeth included this post from Sharp End Training’s blog (here).  I agree with her assessment of the post.  It is a good question but I would have like to seen a take on which corners are typically cut, not why corners were cut.  FWIW, here are my top ten corners typically cut:

Stakeholder management planning
Executing planned [...]

Initiative success measures — poll results to date

The results for the poll are still tallying — it is still open and the link is in a widget on the upper right-hand side of this page.  We only have 11 responses, however, so if folks want to skew them there’s still time!
POLL RESULTS as of 3 July — What is the most important [...]

Sentiment analysis and project debriefs/lessons learned

This post by Giles Palmer at Brandwatch (here) hits on something I’d like to try with our increasing volume of project debriefs.  We’ve done a couple of analyses of project success and trouble factors (I’ve posted on them a number of times, especially here, here, and here), but I’d like to take it to the [...]

Making sure that your deliverables’ benefits are realized

With all my recent scope management posts lately, here’s a timely post on benefits realization (here) at John Gough’s iJourneys blog (here).  I like the theme of his post, that “…benefit realisation does not start when the project ends.”   I also second his point that IT sees itself as apart from the “business” and [...]

More on the Triple Constraint

I’ve gotten a lot of good comments on my previous post on the Triple Constraint.  Just a couple of clarifications, at least from my perspective:

I don’t want to minimize how useful the Triple Constraint is in understanding the basic trade-offs that one must make among scope, time, and resources. 
That said, it is a basic heuristic [...]

The relationship among scope, time, resources, quality, etc.

Thought-provoking post by mysticMundane on the Triple Constraint (here) – hat-tip to Michael at IT Project Failures (here).  IMO, both yielded good insights, with some caveats.  The good:

I always like to see quality included as essential to the triple constraint — Michael has the picture here — the scope isn’t delivered unless the work product conforms to requirements.
Scope [...]

Re-opened: Initiative Success Factor Poll

I got some feedback that it was closed.  Oops…I had forgotten that I had arbitrarily closed it after one week.  Sorry.
Here it is again.  I’ll also maintain a link in the upper right sidebar.