One of the mistakes I have encountered reasonably often in projects is with people (both managers and resources) mistaking e-mail for actual communication. After sending an e-mail, people assume many things, including that: it is read in a timely fashion, the message is understood by the receiver(s), it is enough to generate the action/result desired by the sender. Unfortunately this is rarely the case and overusing e-mail instead of more effective communication mediums (face to face, video-conference, phone or chat), easily generates problems in projects: people not taking action on time, people completing wrong or incomplete deliverables, messages being forwarded to the wrong audience and generating conflicts, etc. In this article I would like to cover why people tend to overuse e-mail, the problems encountered with this communication medium and how to figure out by yourself when you should not use e-mail but a more effective communication medium.
"Web Analytics 2.0 - The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity" - sounds like corporate speak, doesn’t it? The kind of thing you heard before, in messages from your corporate leaders, right? Even though you might answer "Yes!" to any of these questions, this book is not filled with dry, empty corporate speak. It’s really about web analytics. Done right! The way everybody should do it and the way only a few actually do.
As project managers we do not deliver on our own. We deliver as part of a larger organisation. Typically, only a small part of the organisation is involved in the project we are running. What the organisation does share is a culture – or at least a series of broadly consistent behaviours and beliefs. Our ability to deliver successfully is impacted significantly by the culture of the organisation. Some organisations have cultures which seem to facilitate or encourage delivery. Unfortunately, other organisations seem to have developed cultures which are almost perfectly evolved to obstruct delivery at every point.
Even if June hasn’t been a very productive month in terms of articles published on Corporate Geek, it has been a productive month in finding lots of great books and articles to read. This month’s roundup is filled with good stuff to challenge the way you think about certain aspects of humanity, society and the corporate world. Spare a few minutes of your time and go through this list of reading recommendations.
In this article, I want to share some of my experiences of developing new products. I have been involved in several projects to launch new products, and a few to start new businesses. But I’m writing this as much for a general lesson I have learnt from those projects, as to discuss detailed lessons about product development.
One can argue that all projects are about change, even though the degree of change varies a lot between projects. Personally I consider project managers to also be change managers, and knowing different tools and frameworks for managing change critical to any successful project manager. As the title says, “Managing Change Step by Step” is a book about how to successfully approach change projects, especially those that bring more meaningful change to your organisation. In this review i will try to evaluate if this book is useful to have in a project manager’s library of good management books or not. Read on to find out.
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