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Rome seminar: Managing Agile Projects

What keeps CIO’s awake at night?

Among the questions that I wanted to ask CIO’s for my CIO’s at Work book, one was fairly obvious: I wanted to know what gave them nightmares, what kept them awake at night. I could easily imagine every CIO giving me a list of ten or twenty; indeed, you could easily get the impression that [...]

Why don’t CIO’s want to talk to you?

When I started working on my CIO’s at Work book, I naively assumed that I would be able to talk to any CIO I wanted to, and that my main task would be to avoid getting overwhelmed by an infinite number of talkative CIO’s. That turned out not to be true — partly (to my [...]

CIO’s At Work: does your company want to talk about its IT strategy?

About a year ago, I started working on a book that was recently published with the title CIO’s at Work. My plan was fairly straightforward: track down the Chief Information Officer in several companies in various industries, and see what they thought was important. Since I’ve been working in the IT field for over 45 [...]

Extreme Project Management in Rome

I spent most of last week in Rome, presenting a three-day seminar on “Extreme Project Management” for Technology Transfer Institute. If you were stuck in some other part of the world, or if you couldn’t persuade your boss to send you to Rome, you can click here to view and download the 7MB) PDF version of the [...]

Extreme Project Management, Nov 2010

I spent most of last week in Rome, presenting a three-day seminar on “Extreme Project Management” for Technology Transfer Institute. If you were stuck in some other part of the world, or if you couldn’t persuade your boss to send you to Rome, you can click here to view and download the 25MB) PDF version of the [...]

Commentary: “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing”

I noticed an August 2, 2010 article from the University of Texas at Dallas that should be of interesting to anyone focusing on cloud computing: it describes a collection of recently-released tools to help application developers build more robust and secure cloud applications. The article is titled “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing.” The [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 6 – Types of project-management sins: venal and cardinal

The longer I work in the IT industry, the more amazed I am at the type of mistakes that project managers make, and also the way they react to them — both at the time the mistake is committed, and when they talk about it weeks, months, or even years later. I have a somewhat [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 5 – Advice to give *after* a sin has been committed

When a project manager “sinner” sits down to talk with his or her IT “confessor-priest,” one of two situations usually exists: either the sin has already been committed — i.e., the project manager has already made a mistake — or it has not. We’ll discuss these two situations in separate blog postings. Assuming that the [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 4 – ethical responsibilities of the confessor priest

Imagine that I’m the “confessor priest” in an IT project confessional environment, and a troubled project manager walks into my office, and tells me that in a fit of rage, he has just shot an obnoxious, uncooperative, unproductive members of his project team — point blank, right between the eyes. What should I do? Or [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 3 – where do you find the sinners?

What would a priest do if he sat alone in his confessional box all day long, and nobody showed up to confess his sins? Perhaps he would just shrug, and come back again the next day. But eventually, he would … well, I’ll let someone who knows more about the protocol and procedures of organized [...]