PM Quote of the Day — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. 

Podcast on barriers to successful IT/CRM

Michael Krigsman over at IT Project Failures hosted the first in what he hopes will be a regular series of “Town Hall” podcasts (here)  It was originally supposed to be a meet-up, but the weather was dodgy at best so the session went virtual. 
Anyway, Paul Greenberg moderated an excellent discussion that covered a lot of [...]

Projects can die a good death

Nice to see that projects are being ended more often than I would have thought.  Michael Krigsman (here) points to a survey (here) where just under 45 percent of the surveyed organizations claimed to have ended a IT project before it was fully implemented.
Roughly half of these projects were stopped for business-related reasons: changed priorities or [...]

Troubled Projects and Engaging Change Stakeholders

Glen at Herding Cats (here) points to a Center of Business Practices study (here) on the causes of troubled projects.  I’ve posted on some of our own findings about project success (here and here), but I haven’t elaborated on what we’ve found about the composition of change control boards.  Below is an extract from a comment I [...]

Getting out from under in projects

Excellent short post by Stacey Douglas on Exit Strategies as part of Project Plans.  Here is how she closes the post:
The inability to gracefully shut down one project when it needs to be shut down is a huge risk to your overall portfolio and to the company itself. Most of the time, the plan may [...]

Corner Cutting Survey Results: Risk Monitoring

The corner cutting poll’s third answer (at a low 12 percent) is “On-going risk monitoring and control”.  That result was quite a surprise to me.  Neglecting to perform risk activities beyond initial identification and analysis is one of the most common project mistakes that we see.  Surprise at when risks become issues — or when they become so likely [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Collette

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner. 
In many of my roles I’ve dealt with problem projects and people. But while I’m good at fixing broken things, that skill is a mixed blessing.
The reason is that something in my nature makes it easier to focus on the [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Golda Meir

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.
I had forgotten about this quote from one of the most memorable leaders of my youth (more on Golda here).  For those who don’t know, sparring is a boxing or martial art term referring to simulated matches held during training.  It is a way of preparing both [...]

Corner Cutting Survey Top Answer: Not communicating with senior management

The corner cutting poll’s top answer (at 22 percent) remains Executing planned communications with senior management.  This answer matches our own experience within SAP, which indicates that proper stakeholder management decreases the probability of risk events, shortens their duration, and lessens their total impact. 
In our experience, the most frequent communications mistake was failure to execute planned executive-level [...]

Project debriefs…the Army way

Nice post on after-action reviews (AARs, or what we call reviews or debriefs) by Ed Kless at VeraSage.  Ed relates the experience of an United States Army officer in his class (post here).  I especially liked two points:
At AARs all personnel remove their hats. This signifies that in the AAR there is no rank. Insubordination [...]