Embedding Employee Engagement in your processes

Mike King at Learn This has a fairly long post on promoting employee engagement (here) — one last Hat Tip to the PM Blog Carnival (here).  I liked the thoughts in this passage especially:
Make it Part of The System … In order to ensure that employee engagement is something that gets attention, is measured and has [...]

Leadership Failure in Complex Initiatives

Extending a recent theme — leading and learning in complex initiatives — I’ve just started looking at a book on The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations.  Many of the conclusions and insight reflect some earlier posts (collected here).  This post may contain my personal record for categories/tags, I guess the [...]

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 [...]

Develop project simulators — Avoiding the Experience Trap

NOTE: 11th post of a series on an HBR article by Prof. Kishore Sengupta, et al on The Experience Trap. 
I’ve gotten stacked up w/ life and work, time to close out this topic.  We’ve started to look closely at how to put together more effective training for seasoned managers.
It is, however, possible to construct artificial environments that [...]

Set goals for behavior — Avoiding the Experience Trap

NOTE: 10th post of a series on an HBR article by Prof. Kishore Sengupta, et al on The Experience Trap.
The paper outlines some unexpected consequences of the way in which we typically estimate, especially on goals (I’ve quoted liberally from the paper, so I’ve split this post).  I never seriously considered the impact on PM behavior of the [...]

Added new link collection “Complexity Set”

FYI, I’ve added a new page — Complexity Set — that will feature a set of links dealing with the emerging topic of project complexity.  I expect to add quite a few links as we go along.
The first iteration of the page collects my posts to date on “The Experience Trap” HBS article by Prof. [...]

Calibrate estimation tools — Avoiding the Experience Trap

NOTE: 9th post of a series on an HBR article by Prof. Kishore Sengupta, et al on The Experience Trap.
Some interesting observations on the use of PM tools, with a specific focus on estimation.  It is a basic tenet of multivariate analysis to identify the variables most correlated with the desired answer — which implies that one [...]

Reducing SAP implementation time/cost

A case study (here) and press release (here) about a quick, clean SAP Business All-In-One implementation at TomoTherapy.  What stands out about what worked?

Using SAP Best Practices as the baseline.  It makes it very easy when one can leverage a fully documented and functional prototype.
Using a partner willing to leverage SAP Best Practices.  It is instructive [...]

Hiring/Staffing Tools and Guidelines — Avoiding the Experience Trap

NOTE: 8th post of a series on an HBR article by Prof. Kishore Sengupta, et al on The Experience Trap.
While this point is more general — recommending project-focused decision tools and guidelines — I think PMs need to focus on the specific example given: the impact of staffing decisions.
When a manager makes several hires, there is a [...]

Provide Cognitive Feedback — Avoiding the Experience Trap

NOTE: 7th post of a series on an HBR article by Prof. Kishore Sengupta, et al on The Experience Trap. 
This starts the transition to answers about how to avoid the distorting effects of past experience on PMs that manage complex projects.  The first suggestion is to add reporting that focuses on insights on performance drivers.
Project environments [...]