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

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 [...]

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.

“Messaging” to audience vs. letting audience draw conclusions

I liked the differentiation between messages and conclusions by Leo Bottary here.  Once I got over the blog’s name — relentlessPR, which evokes a visceral reaction from the project/operations guy in me — I found some interesting posts.
Last year, I met with a leadership team…who were interested in fine-tuning their key messages. Specifically, the key messages that [...]

Are PMs finally paying more attention to outcomes?

Interesting study reported by siliconrepublic.com (here) on the relative importance of project success measures among the Irish project management community
The most important measure[s] of success among the respondent project managers [were] to achieve organisational objectives (70pc)… and matching stakeholder expectations key for 63pc.
Being on time and on budget were only rated about half as highly, which [...]

Challenges of Strategy Articulation

Jonathan has a good post (here) deconstructing the “strategy management” mess (perpetuated by someone on the “other side” here).  His blog also has some great posts on strategy management itself (here) and on cascading (here).  I like his simple “formulation, articulation, execution” strategy management process breakdown.
What I’ve most struggled with is strategy articulation.  Jonathan notes [...]

Accountability and Project Management

Good post on accountability by lazymale at Lap31 (here).  It is a tough message for many PMs.  However, this trait, competency, or behavior — whatever you want to call it — is what differentiates successful PMs.  The leader PM may fail, but will get second chances.  The “victim” PM will likely never again be trusted with anything [...]

Embrace and Plan for Change — Tips from Project Failure Blog

The last entry of my series of comments on the project success checklist at Michael Krigsman’s Project Failure Blog.. My comments are scattered among his notes (excerpted below). I’d love to hear your comments on the details behind some of these factors as we go …
5. Embrace and plan for change — Most large-scale technology [...]