November 11th, 2012
I spent most of last week in Rome, presenting a three-day seminar on “Managing Agile Projects” 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 47.9MB) PDF version of the [...]
November 7th, 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 [...]
July 12th, 2010
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 [...]
July 11th, 2010
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 [...]
July 9th, 2010
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 [...]
July 7th, 2010
Yesterday, I introduced the concept of a “project confessional,” where troubled IT project managers could confess their “sins” and ask for help. Before we delve into the more subtle issues associated with such a confessional, I want to cover the basics … and before I do that, I want to acknowledge that this is not [...]
July 6th, 2010
Imagine that you’re an IT project manager, and that you’ve just discovered you’ve made a terrible decision. It wasn’t deliberate, and perhaps it wasn’t even conscious; maybe it was a momentary outburst at an uncooperative programmer, caused by all the pressure and exhaustion from overtime. But now your uncooperative programmer has quit in a huff, [...]
June 4th, 2010
To anticipate the social impact of future IT, it would help to be an expert sociologist with a perfect crystal ball. I don’t have such expertise, so I’ll restrict my comments to specific areas where I think I have some vague idea of what I’m talking about … and aside from that, I’ll simply recommend [...]
March 16th, 2010
I’m giving a one-hour presentation Tues evening (Mar 16th) on “Death March Projects in Today’s Hard Times,” at the regular monthly meeting of Boston’s Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) chapter. It will take place in one of the buildings of MITRE’s campus in Bedford, MA, somewhere in the vast wilderness north of Route 128. You [...]
December 4th, 2009
I’m here in Rome this week, participating in a conference on “Enterprise 2.0” for Technology Transfer Institute. You should be there so you can hear the presentations from all of the speakers, as well as the comments and questions from the participants. But if you’re stuck in some other part of the world, or you couldn’t [...]
