Why? Well, quite simply because we all do projects. Even if they’re small, even if we think of them as one-person projects, project management ensures that these projects got done as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. But this project management can’t be the heavy-duty stuff of the big methodologies. This project management has to …
In 1995, Martin Cobb, then CIO for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, asked a question which has since become known as Cobb’s Paradox. He said: ‘We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?’ ‘We know why projects fail’ Well … we sort-of do. …
If you think about it in its simplest terms, when any project is executed – something tiny like making dinner, all the way up to something massive, like Brexit – the project happens because a sequence of jobs is carried out. To be even more precise, each day of the project, each one of a …
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Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review published an article called The 4 Types of Project Manager. The article described how different types of growth opportunities require different types of project managers to run them. It’s a good article. It’s been my experience that there are indeed four types of project manager – though in …
Obviously, the only way you can know for sure whether your project is in trouble or not is to (a) have a properly estimated plan and (b) be monitoring properly against it. Those issues are discussed elsewhere on www.fastproject.org. However, there are a number of signs I have seen over the years which are guaranteed …
Okay, so hopefully we’ve established https://fastprojects.org/2017/08/23/we-dont-have-time-to-plan-it-just-go-do-it/ that planning is a good idea and that the alternative – ‘we don’t have time to plan it – just go do it’ is, to put it mildly, rather dumb. But how can we estimate accurately when estimation is – basically – predicting the future and something that no …
Don’t know if you’ve ever heard somebody – typically, a boss or a manager – say ‘we don’t have time to plan it – just go do it’. And maybe you’ve wondered if this is good advice / a good strategy / good management practice. After all, they’re probably more senior to you, more highly …
If you want to shorten a project there is one place where – more than any other – this can be achieved. This is right at the beginning, as soon as the idea for the project is born. You don’t have to take my word for this. In their book, Developing Products in Half the …
It’s the classic situation that all project managers find themselves in, sooner or later. The deadline is fixed but the requirements still haven’t been decided. Every day that passes is a day lost than can never be recovered. But this time it’s different. This is the true nightmare scenario. There isn’t just one project – …