Two of the biggest recent trends in management have been Six Sigma and Lean. These were originally separate approaches, but they are often conflated nowadays into Lean Six Sigma. In this article I treat them as one discipline, although each brings different tools, areas of focus and value.
I do not see Lean Six Sigma as a panacea for all business problems, as some of its staunchest advocates present it, but it has proven its value. Lean Six Sigma is not exactly leading edge thinking, but it has powerful lessons for project managers and project teams which are new to many practitioners.
Project closures tend to be executed in a quick & superficial manner. People want to get rid of the project and move on to something new, as soon as possible. Unfortunately, doing this, means you are wasting a great opportunity to learn and improve. In this article, I would like to go through they key steps of a good project closure and argue that, doing this right, is key to learning and development.
I would like to look at the assumption underlying many project plans, that the future is actually predictable. All management models have this assumption at their core and all organizations spend a lot of time planning all kinds of things: budgets, revenues, project outcomes, etc. This article will spend some time identifying the flaws of these models and give some tips on how to overcome them. I hope you will find them both useful and interesting.
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.
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.
I would like to continue our series of articles on Examples of Poor Project Management with an article about something apparently trivial - the creation of Work Breakdown Structures during the planning activities of a project. Even though it seems to be a no-brainer, at least to an experienced project manager, I’m always surprised to see how many of my peers simply ignore this tool. Even most (if not all) project management literature praises the usefulness of this tool, as a critical input to Project Scheduling, this tool is not as used as it should be. This article will try to explore the reasons why this happens and the main negative outcomes of such practice.
Read any guide to project management, or have a discussion on project management processes, and there is normally one important assumption that is taken for granted: your work as project manager starts at the beginning of the project. Unfortunately, this is not always the situation. In this article I want to cover such situation and share some advice based on my personal experience.
Two of the biggest recent trends in management have been Six Sigma and Lean. These were originally separate approaches, but they are often conflated nowadays into Lean Six Sigma. In this article I treat them as one discipline, although each brings different tools, areas of focus and value.
Project closures tend to be executed in a quick & superficial manner. People want to get rid of the project and move on to something new, as soon as possible. Unfortunately, doing this, means you are wasting a great opportunity to learn and improve. In this article, I would like to go through they key steps of a good project closure and argue that, doing this right, is key to learning and development.
I would like to look at the assumption underlying many project plans, that the future is actually predictable. All management models have this assumption at their core and all organizations spend a lot of time planning all kinds of things: budgets, revenues, project outcomes, etc. This article will spend some time identifying the flaws of these models and give some tips on how to overcome them. I hope you will find them both useful and interesting.
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.
I would like to continue our series of articles on Examples of Poor Project Management with an article about something apparently trivial - the creation of Work Breakdown Structures during the planning activities of a project. Even though it seems to be a no-brainer, at least to an experienced project manager, I’m always surprised to see how many of my peers simply ignore this tool. Even most (if not all) project management literature praises the usefulness of this tool, as a critical input to 
Read any guide to project management, or have a discussion on project management processes, and there is normally one important assumption that is taken for granted: your work as project manager starts at the beginning of the project. Unfortunately, this is not always the situation. In this article I want to cover such situation and share some advice based on my personal experience.
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