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Archive for 13 January 2005
Spotted on Frank Patrick’s Focussed Performance Business Blog:
“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
A nice sentiment to remember when the temptation to get lost in the detail takes hold.
If you haven’t already come across ecademy, it’s worth a look. There’s an active project management community there, and there are often some real gems posted into the community’s forum.
This idea was posted by David Walker in response to a post of mine, talking about the problems of getting agreement on requirements:
A pretty neat thing to get your steering group to agree is a set of principles – if a requirement doesn’t meet all the principles everyone should agree that it gets kicked into touch (or put into Phase II which amounts to the same thing!). Example principles might be;- ‘keep it vanilla’ (eg; for packaged implementations – Peoplesoft etc) – keep the software as it comes out of the box, with no unnecessary development
- no paper – nothing gets printed
- no additional hardware
- no change costing more than £x
- no hand-offs in the process
- automation, no pre-existing processes ‘computerised’
This strikes me as a simple, but very effective approach – very often it can be difficult to argue against requirements becoming more complicated mid-stream, or ensure that there’s agreement in the first place. Taking this approach means that you get agreement early on about the parameters of what’s acceptable and what isn’t – and gives you a ‘lever to pull’ if the goalposts start to drift later on.
And if you’re working in a Prince environment, this can be formalised in the Project Definition section of the Project Initiation Document, which gives a degree of ‘legal force’ to the agreement.
Phil Wolff of diJEST.com has an interesting selection of project management checklists and templates available here, including a copy of the 1996 PMBOK (for thost light bedtime reading moments.)
This one is particularly useful as a sanity check during project initiation, and there’s a lot more besides. Useful stuff.
Dave Pollard writes a consistently interesting (and prolific!) blog on a wide variety of subjects, mainly centering around business innovation and knowledge management. There’s so much there it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with everything that he posts, but much of what he writes is worth reading.
This article from a couple of days ago is an interesting – and comprehensively argued – take on managing change in organisations. Dave’s perspective is that the only way that organisations will succeed in the long term is to enable its employees to work smarter rather than harder – and the only to ensure that this happens is to equip them with the skills and the competencies that they need.
Invest effectively in developing Critical Skills and you’ll reap Creative Solutions. That’s the best ROI you can get.
A quick summary like this really doesn’t do justice to the very comprehensively thought-out arguments – and it’s made more interesting by the fact that Dave is practising what he preaches, reinventing himself publicly along the lines that he’s suggesting. Consistently thought-provoking, he’s worth a visit.
