It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try a search or browse one of our posts below.

ManagementSpeak: The individual employee meetings with the board chair went fine.
Translation: Which of you ratted me out?

I can’t tell you who contributed this week’s entry. That would rat him out.

You’re managing a project. What can go wrong?

Well …

Scenario #1: It’s hard to overcome the CEO

A friend managed a business transformation tied to a large software suite (I’m not allowed to be more specific). Her client was a multinational concern that wasn’t wise in the ways of project management. She had a strong team, the right work breakdown structure, a good working relationship with the vendor, and a committed executive sponsor.

But then the CEO happened. All by itself, just one restructuring would have driven quite a bit of re-work into the project. Multiples multiplied the impact.

And that’s before the ritual laying off of several people the project couldn’t do without. As The Mythical Man Month makes clear, replacing these key staff slowed things down even more, as the effort needed to acclimate the project newbies to the project and their responsibilities exceeded any benefit they could provide.

My friend got the project done, but it got done much uglier than it needed to.

Lesson learned: Include a list of specific critical personnel in your project Risks and Issues reporting, and make sure that reporting is visible at least one layer higher than the project’s sponsor. It won’t completely prevent the chaos, but it might reduce it.

Scenario #2: A filter that should be a conduit

So you say your executive sponsor cares deeply about your project’s success. You say he’s assigned the right people to the core team, and has let everyone else know they should support the project when their support is called for.

And … he’s a busy guy, so he’s delegated day-to-day sponsorship to a trusted member of his team, who is to be your primary Point of Contact. His busyness also means he has no time for regular face-to-face updates.

But not to worry. Your PoC meets with him weekly, and will keep him informed.

As the project progresses, unexpected discoveries drive a number of course corrections. Taken one at a time, none seem particularly controversial, so you and your PoC make the decisions and move on.

A couple of months later, though, with a major milestone approaching, you bring the sponsor in for a briefing. That’s when you discover that what seemed minor to you seems less minor to your sponsor, and the decisions you and your PoC to resolve the issues weren’t the solutions the sponsor would have chosen.

This is when you find out your PoC either hasn’t embraced the “bad news doesn’t improve with age” dictum or also didn’t think the issues in question were important enough to mention in his weekly updates.

And, it’s when you first figure out the sponsor defines “handled correctly” as “how I would have handled it,” and “handled wrong” as “all other ways of handling it.”

So now you have an irritated sponsor and a project schedule that’s in recovery mode.

You can’t entirely avoid this. What might at least help is, prior to your PoC’s weekly meetings with the project sponsor, rehearse the topics to be covered in the project update.

Scenario #3: EPMO — enabler or bureaucracy

Congratulations! As a result of your many well-managed projects and the value they delivered, you’ve been promoted to the Enterprise Program Management Office — the EPMO. In your new role you’re responsible for ensuring all project investments are worthwhile, and providing oversight to make sure they’re well-managed by project managers who aren’t you.

And so, guided by “industry best practices,” you establish a governance process to screen out proposals that don’t make the grade.

Then you start to hear those governed by the EPMO use the B-word in your general direction. No, not that B-word. Bureaucrat.

Which, if you think your job is to screen out bad proposals, you’ve become.

First and worst, a bureaucrat evaluates proposals. A leader evaluates the ideas behind the proposals.

Second and almost as worst, if you expect to see dumb ideas you’ll see dumb ideas, because most people, most of the time, see what they expect to see. And anyway, if what you do is screen out dumb ideas you’ll pass the proposals that don’t give you a reason to screen them out, not those that give you a reason to keep them in.

So take the B out of your job. Starting tomorrow, the EPMO’s job is to help good ideas succeed.

Followed by your stretch goal: to help turn good ideas into great ones.

It’s Halloween, so Christmas can’t be far away, and you know what that means. Yes, it’s Bah Humbug season again! So here’s my list of the 10 worst trends in computing.
10. Consultants are now the source of all wisdom.
If you need to make an investment, you first add 10 percent in overhead by bringing in an independent consultant to tell the key decision-makers what you want them to hear.
Instead, let’s be each others’ experts. So if you need me to come in and tell your executives how much money they’ll make with computer-telephone integration — no problem! I must be an expert: after all, I wrote a book!
Let’s say you’re an expert too. If you say we should abandon our leased-line systems network architecture network and replace it with frame-relay-based LAN internetworking, so be it.
9. Emergence of the Internal Customer
This is the most idiotic notion in the history of business. Here’s the theory: If my outbasket empties into your inbasket, you’re my customer. You can make the same kinds of demands on my time and complain just as bitterly as a real customer when I don’t deliver on time.
Here’s a clue: Customers pay money for service!
IS groups exist not to provide assistance to their internal customers, but to work with their internal partners to provide better products and services to the company’s real customers.
8. Microsoft has become the new Japan.
Remember when American managers whined about Japan and how you couldn’t compete with it? Well, guess what? Now we have Microsoft.
Microsoft is a formidable competitor, largely because Bill Gates sticks with a product until it becomes a tough product to beat. As IS professionals take over the process of specifying software, many repeat their old mantra but replace IBM with Microsoft, as in “I won’t get fired for buying Microsoft.”
Now there’s a great reason for picking a product.
7. Evolution of client/server, part II: It’s soooo complicated.
Novell succeeded because once you set up your PC with a 50KB pair of drivers, the LAN looked just like a local hard drive and printer.
Look what they’ve done to the simple, elegant client/server model. It’s heartbreaking. Think about the simplicity of the LAN model, folks, and emulate it.
6. Evolution of client/server, part I: SQL.
Do any of you still think SQL was the right choice? I didn’t think so.
When you figure that Codd has 13 of his 12 rules of relational whatever, and that relational purists still flinch at the idea of an index, you get some notion of just how bad life has become. Add to that the underestanding that the power of relational databases comes from your ability to define tables independently and relate them as needed and you understand the power of mythology in our lives.
Face it, folks, SQL is a crying shame. Here’s an industry secret: To define a database, you have to analyze data relationships anyway. In a hierarchical or network database model, you maintain pointers. In a relational model, you maintain indices. The only difference: Pointers give you faster performance.
5. App is now a word.
Presumably because the cost of paper has risen over the years, several publications decided to save space by calling applications “apps,” as in “killer apps” or “great new app.”
I have a hard time deciding which is more noxious: over use of the word “cool” or trying to sound cool by calling applications “apps.”
4. Architect has become a verb.
Did you mean to say “design”? Maybe you meant to say “engineer.” The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees your right to say that you “architected a great system.” Say it to someone else. I think it makes you sound like a dweeb.
3. Free support now costs money.
Do me a favor. Print one number for use when your product doesn’t work as advertised. Print a different number for me to use when I need consulting support about how to use your product. Charge for calling that number.
2. GUIs are ushering in the end of the PC.
I have one DOS-based application I still use on a regular basis. Even when I don’t really need it, I sometimes launch it anyway, just to remember what snappy response time looks like.
Any semi-educated adult with an IQ in three digits could buy a DOS-based PC and puzzle out enough of the basics in an hour or two to get it running. DOS was simple enough for everyone.
You need at least a Ph.D., and probably a Nobel Prize to figure out OS/2 or Windows, and the problem is obvious: They have syntax, and syntax isn’t user-friendly. Bill Gates may be a genius, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out: One quick glance at SYSTEM.INI would tell anyone with an ounce of sense that this is a Rube Goldberg contraption just waiting to break.
GUIs certainly could have been great. Instead, we have huge, bulky, god-awful slow, multitasking behemoths on our desks so we can do one job at a time but have the rest sitting in open windows. It didn’t have to be this way.
1. Operation systems have replaced religions.
These are operating systems, not religions. I picked Windows despite my loathing for it because everyone writes for it! Got that? Windows and DOS have more than 80 percent market share, so the war is over! Let’s all agree that NextStep and QNX should have all of the market if there was any justice, and that if IBM had any brains they would have adapted Unix to the desktop instead of inventing OS/2. And then let’s get over it.
And I like this industry.