Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Feb 8, 2012, 11:51 am
Are we managing projects or are we conducting experiments? Managing you say? Are you really sure?
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Feb 6, 2012, 11:58 am
How an experiment in brewing the perfect pot of coffee can help us to improve our project management
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Feb 1, 2012, 11:49 am
Problems are often opportunities in disguise. Here, a high turnover of staff was turned into a force for project management change and improvement.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jan 30, 2012, 10:04 am
I simply said “hey, I got a great idea, let’s do X!” Everyone got excited and we finally had an effective technique. Where did I find this new technique?
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jan 23, 2012, 9:55 am
At such an inauspicious moment, with management dead set against the idea, it surely would have seemed foolhardy to continue designing computer operating systems.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jan 19, 2012, 2:00 pm
"Yet study after study, analyst after analyst, say that developers are making the same mistakes they made in 2000. That they made in 1990. And earlier."
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 31, 2011, 10:04 am
This is bad, right? Only about half the tasks scheduled get accomplished in the required week. As a project manager I thought “great, I can work with this!” Huh? Why is that?
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 28, 2011, 10:10 am
We had the premier project for the organization and we were determined to finally get a product out on-time and with good quality. We did it, and in doing so highlighted how many of our rules were not really helping us to complete a quality project.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 24, 2011, 12:45 pm
Managers spend all their time with their “best” folks and let their “under-performers” just kind of exist. This may be misguided if we want to significantly improve our performance.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 21, 2011, 11:25 am
Lack of sufficient sleep may compromise the efficacy of typical dietary interventions for weight loss and related metabolic risk reduction. What does this have to do with project management? Everything!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 19, 2011, 12:40 pm
Project management is often about learning to communicate in another language. I’m not talking about a national language, but instead the language of the industry or domain that we are working in.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 17, 2011, 10:31 am
A metric is a project management tool that captures an essential aspect of the project or organization and provides insight allowing us to make rapid and accurate project management decisions. Here are five secrets for creating successful project management metrics.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 12, 2011, 11:00 am
We took the official plan document and turned it into a real plan that we used everyday. This was different from the classic plan that was created to meet a checklist requirement. Here is how we made the change and how moving to a real plan can often confuse folks and how we overcame this normal co...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 10, 2011, 12:07 pm
“More and more,” Carlson says, “innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly and dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.”
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 29, 2011, 11:09 am
This is obvious, yes? If we do work for a customer, we charge them for it. Ok, so the customer would rather get work done for free. It helps their bottom line after all, doesn’t it? Maybe not.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 23, 2011, 11:27 am
My job was to evaluate how well our government projects were doing. The projects were expected to be using the prescribed latests and greatest project management tools and development technologies to help ensure they were successful. Here is how we finally achieved an "A" in our project management....
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 12, 2011, 11:34 am
Project management is often about getting people to do the things we need them to do. Here is how we got people to better follow policy by improving how we communicated and how we can apply this to managing projects.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 7, 2011, 11:50 am
Ways to avoid succumbing to the bureaucratization and standardization of what is working well while encouraging continual innovation from deep within your organization.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 5, 2011, 10:28 am
We know everything we need to know (or at least enough), and if we just apply it, we will be successful, even without fancy new project management tools.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 2, 2011, 10:20 am
The problem was that we never knew where to start or what to work on first. This was the source of many arguments and many stops and starts in improvement projects. Now, we knew.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 29, 2011, 11:43 am
Ugh. That never worked for me -- having folks volunteer to work on innovations or having a dedicated innovations team. Over managing the innovation process can undermine its effectiveness.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 24, 2011, 11:29 am
It’s a business management problem! Management’s goal should be to figure out a way to facilitate data access. We’ve lost the ability to move quickly. Our approval cycles squash great ideas. We kill with kindness and best intentions.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 22, 2011, 11:39 am
Many projects have an S shaped pattern that is our adoption success curve for our effort. Understanding our project adoption and productivity curves will help us ensure our projects are successful.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 18, 2011, 12:23 pm
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Sounds just like project management!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 16, 2011, 11:24 am
The CEO of Motorola told all their employees to stop using other manufacturer's cell phones and only use Motorola phones. It was indefensible, he said, that Motorola employees would be seen using, for example, Nokia phones on the job. This behavior made it look like Motorolans didn’t like their o...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 13, 2011, 11:28 am
Stop doing something you suspect is unproductive and see if anyone notices says Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiner. I love it!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 11, 2011, 10:52 am
Especially for complex and costly IT projects, customers need to invest more in the up-front evaluation. Oh, no. Here we go again.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 9, 2011, 10:34 am
The enormous increase in effort with very short schedules is due to much of the work on the project morphing into wasteful activity called optional chaos.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 6, 2011, 10:27 am
Myspace went too wide and not deep enough in its product development. We went with a lot of products that were shallow and not the best product in the world. Speed to market was essential.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 3, 2011, 10:45 am
I face the dilemma: Either be patient and build consensus, or move ahead without the full team’s support. My sense is that it’s time for a change in approach -- time for more personal risk-taking and less conventional wisdom.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jul 30, 2011, 11:26 am
Only the knowledge workers know exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. Because knowledge work is invisible, no one else, including the managers, can understand what the knowledge workers are doing or how they are doing it.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jul 27, 2011, 11:14 am
Oh no, I’ve got a room full of computer "experts." None of them have any training in computer management, but they “know” what needs to be done. We are doomed.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jul 13, 2011, 1:09 pm
I've always been fascinated by how projects and organizations populated by a lot of smart people often just didn't do well. I spent 20 years in the Air Force followed by just over 10 years in the corporate world. There was an unsettling management consistency between these two worlds. I've come t...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jul 9, 2011, 11:55 am
The FBI Sentinel project had been problem-plagued and had converted over to Agile. The Sentinel project in turn had sprung out of the FBI’s “Virtual Case File” system which was considered a failure. I'm always interested in lessons learned from projects that struggle to be successful.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jun 27, 2011, 9:39 am
Success is an amazingly difficult notion to objectively pin down in many projects.  While we need to be flexible, I've noted that there is a fine line between flexibility and chaos.  Often it is but a single voice that makes all the difference.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jun 22, 2011, 11:44 am
On his first day, Elop sent an e-mail to every employee asking what they thought he should change, what should be left alone,and what they feared he wouldn’t understand. What a great project management tool.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jun 20, 2011, 11:14 am
A carefully selected set of practices that match an organization’s needs is better than using one methodology exclusively.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jun 11, 2011, 12:13 pm
I use to travel, a lot. The worst part about travelling was the loss of time. Yes, I could try to work on the plane but it was never very efficient. Inevitably, a lot of the time in travel was just dead time. Boy, did that turn out to be productive!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Jun 6, 2011, 12:12 pm
I just spent the weekend at Odyssey of the Mind World Finals watching a lot of real smart and very creative kids show their solutions to various creative problems.  It reminded me that they were good not only because they were smart and talented, but because they spent their time, with a passion, d...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - May 23, 2011, 12:31 pm
I kept wondering how we could be world leaders but be so bad at managing our efforts that made us leaders? Something wasn’t quite right in this dichotomy. Maybe, I thought, this is just the cost of being good at what we do -- by failing often.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - May 16, 2011, 11:47 am
The software project manager said he needed more people, more money and more time. This brought to mind a great quote I heard many years ago, that went something like "engineering is doing with $1 what any fool can do with $2."
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - May 10, 2011, 11:52 am
“Our strategy is sound. It is aspects of our operational execution that are not.” Boy, how often have I heard that. Another variation is that if we just didn’t have any problems our projects would all be on time, on budget and unqualified successes!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - May 3, 2011, 11:36 am
Déjà vu. I’m doing nothing more than helping out as my father-in-law is recovering from having gone to the hospital. All the chaos and concern seemed very familiar in an eerie way ... kind of like … an out of control project!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Apr 25, 2011, 12:26 pm
My best mentors helped me figure out how to do my job better by giving me information and insight, and not by yelling at me to work harder or to stop bringing up all my crazy project management tool ideas!
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Apr 11, 2011, 7:58 am
Would you tell your project team that it is OK to not get the product working because real-life experience is that sometimes things don’t work out?
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Mar 29, 2011, 1:33 pm
In trying to get a handle on improving product performance, we discovered that simple examples were more effective as project management tools than were complex charts and spreadsheets.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Mar 15, 2011, 9:15 am
Meetings are seen as either the way we manage projects or the bane of efficient project management. Can boycotting meetings really help us straighten this mess out?
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Mar 8, 2011, 11:28 am
Project managers can see from a kid's morning routine why using data instead of direction can often be a better tool for getting the results we want.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Feb 22, 2011, 11:00 am
I'm a great advocate of managing using objective, data driven, project management tools.  I often call it being "brutally honest" but with the insight it is only "brutal" to organizations that have locked themselves into other than objective approaches.  Here are five reasons why being objective i...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Feb 15, 2011, 8:32 am
Sometimes it is the team process and not the project requirements that determines a project's schedule.
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