Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Dec 7, 2009, 12:19 pm
Not all improvements require a fancy new development methodology or project management tool. Removing existing cultural and management inhibitors, while often not easy, can vault your team or organ...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Nov 30, 2009, 11:29 am
Balance using your e-mail project management tool with talking one-on-one to key people, but beware of overdoing talking in person.
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Nov 24, 2009, 2:19 pm
My article on e-mail infoglut resulted in a pointer from DoddsSimon to Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann. Merlin takes classic time management ideas and applies them to e-mail. One notion he presents is th...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Nov 20, 2009, 11:04 am
IEEE Spectrum ran an article on "Infoglut" in October 2009. The article was light on specific techniques to manage "Infoglut", so here are five related to e-mail that I've found useful for the pr...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Nov 12, 2009, 10:53 am
Reducing the project management tool "honesty buffers" is a way to rapidly improve the organization. Much of what I've talked about assumed that we really did know what was going on, and it was m...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Nov 3, 2009, 10:16 pm
Eliminating “Honesty Buffers” helps to confront your organizational project management bad habits and hence improve your productivity and quality.   Here are nine techniques I’ve used to succe...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 29, 2009, 7:00 am
Manufacturing buffers help to smooth over problems at each stage of production. The project management tool "honesty buffer" is when someone holds back reporting issues and problems to make things lo...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 19, 2009, 7:31 am
One of the profound findings during the productivity improvement era of the 20th century was the notion that if you focus on productivity you improve productivity a bit, but if you focus on quality yo...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 15, 2009, 11:34 am
While we teach our young the errors of our ways, we need to help them understand that doing what is right is often hard. I tell them that if they don't learn to do better than we did, then their k...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 13, 2009, 7:01 am
Improving team performance is as much about attitude as it is about using specific techniques to improve quality.  Here, “It Should Work The First Time” caught the imagination of the staff and be...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 11, 2009, 1:39 pm
We had a great discussion on LinkedIn on the article The One Key Step For Successful Improvements.  The discussion strayed into a topic near and dear to me, which is how do we get a good estimate of ...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 8, 2009, 4:38 am
The key step?  You have to change something that will actually help you.  Here, “test every line of code” made a huge difference in this software organization. This is the first of several artic...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Oct 4, 2009, 3:34 pm
A busy test organization can mean your products are having problems. In this case however, the fact they were very busy helped the test organization to stay objective about reporting dramatically imp...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 29, 2009, 10:28 pm
Improving quality can have a surprisingly stressful impact on your testing organization. A good set of quality metrics can help keep your improvements on track as your organizations adjusts to the ne...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 24, 2009, 12:16 am
Your test organization will often provide the first indicator that you’ve improved how you do business. How this shows up however, might be rather different than you would expect. Test organizations...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 14, 2009, 10:47 pm
There are some great techniques such as Six Sigma that can boost your productivity.  Sometimes these techniques, if used too early, may be too strong a medicine for your organization. I often advoc...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 7, 2009, 9:21 pm
Get out of sync with what everyone else is doing.  When your organization is not succeeding and you keep doing what was done in the past, you are going to get the same results.  The path to improvem...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Sep 2, 2009, 10:50 pm
Business Intelligence is insight into how your business is operating.  Development of new products is a business activity.  Why not use BI techniques in your project management?  You will do better...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 30, 2009, 11:32 pm
A study of the global project Microsoft Vista showed, when controlled for various variables, that quality was not compromised because of the global nature of the effort.  As many projects are global ...
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Bruce Benson posted an article on Project Management Tools That Work - Aug 25, 2009, 12:22 pm
You should manage both your critical project path and your critical project thread.  The critical thread is what I call the subset of the organization that has the processes that are key to the succe...
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