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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Confronting Reality using “Emotional Risk Management”

Charles Green’s Trust Matters blog (here) is another HR World Top 100 blog – he focuses on the important of trust in professional relationships (with an emphasis on professional services). 
Here he highlights a simple formula for gaining trust — Name it and Claim it — in challenging situations.  In particular, when you’ve found that there is:
…an elephant [...]

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 [...]

Structuring Risk Statements

Rich Maltzman at Scope crêpe has a post that highlights the need to appropriately structure risk statements (here).  I had commented (here) on Rich’s earlier post (here) on assumptions and risk.
A common feature of troubled projects is that their risk statements (if they exist) are too generic.  In other words, they could apply to any project, with any [...]

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 [...]