Leadership and managing conflicting priorities? Perhaps true leadership anticipates priority conflicts at the time of strategy formulation. When strategic imperatives are at odds, this should be apparent to leadership at the time the strategies are articulated. How about a rule of the roads that establishes a true precedence order in case things aren’t clear cut…
Category: Projects
The Power of Sentiment
Never, ever underestimate the power of sentiment. This is especially true in situations where implementing change from a project management perspective is a key success factor. All of the recent hype (both fact and fiction) surrounding the iPhone 4 will serve as an excellent case study someday when all the facts are on the table…
Start Less, Finish More (Part 2)
The following is always one of my favorite examples of why “starting less” is almost always “finishing more”. I am presenting two Gantt charts with four projects each. The charts respresent 12 equal periods going across, a year if you count each period as a month. Let’s assume each project requires 12 man-months of effort…
Start Less, Finish More
For the longest time I have been preaching “finish more than you start”. Ok, so this defies logic, but if put in the context of projects, I have restated it to “you can start one project for every two you complete”. Oh wait, this is still problematic. Ok, the real issue here is to insure…
Why are our definitions of “done” different?
This is certainly a critical question to ask yourself – and the positive approach to this is “Let’s make sure we all have the same definition for being done”. This is a variation on the theme of success criteria and what does success look like, but really gets more to the heart of each and…
This is really important, that’s why I left it on your chair!
This actually happened to me not too long ago – I came back to my office after having been at another location the previous afternoon, to find a critical document placed on my office chair. The sticky note (it wouldn’t really be considered critical without a sticky note) boldly declared “please follow-up ASAP, thanks”. I…
The People You Lead Don’t Use their Turn Signals
Now, that’s interesting. What does using your turn signals have to do with leadership? That depends on what you think the purpose of a turn signal is anyway. Turn signals on a vehicle are intended to communicate your intentions, they are a way to share information, to document and broadcast to everyone around you that…
Death by 1,000 Sound Bites
I just can’t leave well enough alone, but I have seen a large number of projects derailed by a cascade of sound bites. This post, a follow-on to the post on facts versus sound bites stresses the importance of issue management, (hit list, hot list, top 10) to insure that focus is continually placed where…
Fuzzy Objectives yield Fuzzy Results
No matter how many resources may be involved in “delivering the goods”, things are usually much better if you have a very good definition of what you are trying to accomplish. A large challenge with complex initiatives in business today, is that a numerous decisions must be made all the time to make forward progress….