Bridging between people and technology
Image via Wikipedia Part two -Get your point accross Read Part one Basic teaching skills I use the word teaching because there is really no difference between teaching/learning and communication of any other sort. Your role is to help people understand the concepts you are communicating and to see the world in the same way … Read more
Read Part one Read Part two Presentation skills – Part three As part of a series on soft skills for project managers, last week I wrote a section on communication skills. It may seem that it is a little odd not to include presentation skills as a communication skill and I will certainly not argue … Read more
(Who’s minding the shop?) This blog is an attempt to stimulate discussion and understanding of the balance of responsibility for delivering business benefits from IT investment. It is now fairly widely recognised that this is not as simple as choosing a system, getting it working and reaping the benefits, but as yet we can call … Read more
I’m not suggesting that project management is poor in the organisations without Prince 2, in fact it can even be better.
Neither am I suggesting that Prince 2 has not had a positive impact on the organisations that borrow bits of it.
The blame for failed change projects
51% put the failures down to “winning hearts and minds” followed by 31% citing “Lack of clearly defined achievable milestones” and then “lack of management buy-in “ and “poor communication”.
These responses don’t describe a failed change management programme, they describe non existence of a change programme, i.e little more than a wish.
If the Project manager rarely sees the battlefield, and spends his time constructing fantasy plans without ever checking with reality and assuming that things will stay the same, then imagine how far removed the average programme manager is.
Few IT professionals have any grasp of the difficulty facing a business person who needs to stay abreast of tough competitors and try to win competitive advantage via IT without understanding how IT works sufficiently to make the right decisions.
Few people in business have any appreciation of exactly how complex and demanding a job it is to ask them what they want, give it to them and get a “thank you, that was great.”
Don’t let this reference to red tape fool you. It is mission critical to understand the difference between vital process and red tape and it’s not always immediately obvious.
The key to cost cutting in any area is knowing what to cut. The word we are after is waste, but even that can be misleading. In the world of Lean everything outside of the critical value adding moment is deemed to be waste, but nobody imagines that you can eliminate most of it let alone all.
The problem with C Image via WikipediaOTS purchases and traditional testing methods is just that.
Well, it’s just that the methods were designed for a world where teams of engineers spent months writing code and then began to stabilise it and introduce it slowly into the business environment until it was a stable release and a good match for the tightly defined requirements. At least that was the theory,
Image via Wikipedia Outside of the area of direct sales and many would argue to include that too, there has been a momentous movement away from good old fashioned man management techniques. (please read Man to mean both genders, this is an old term well worth revisiting). Some blame Matrix management, others blame the growing … Read more
Some failures are just good managers failing to hit ridiculous targets. Others are driven by unspoken politics, many are caused by inability to define business goals, let alone requirements.
A five year study in Europe was enlightening.
1. It investment should never cost you money, it is an investment and the ROI should be clear.
Build a business case professionally and then invest with confidence.
The question to ask is; who would you rather trust with your capital, your own business, some investment bank, or maybe a fund manager?
In the last instalment we discussed the way in which a vendor had been chosen that near total disregard for the goals of the project in the course of making that decision. Now we will look at what happened after the decision was made.
Part one – What would you like sir Part two – Requirements,tests, training, help files Part three – Why no project exists onin isolation-whwat should be done Part four – Business rules, Process rules, Process, Data, different viewpoints Part five – Testing requirements is not optional Part six -Requirements strategy can make or break your project Yes … Read more
Really! – Have you seen this new stuff?
This could easily have been Mick Jagger and Keith Richards after their first successful gig. In the modern world, it is more likely to be a hard working CTO talking to a COO about his systems needs