How Email Causes Meetings
People have complained about meetings for years. Now email has joined
meetings as worker's least favorite activities. What email has added to the
mix is that bad email practices actually cause more meetings to occur.
Additionally, meetings are now taking on the same bad practices as email.
Here is how, why, and what to do about it.
Three Immutable Laws of Risk
Management
Risk management is a grand notion and helps those that
practice it. Unfortunately there are three major roadblocks that prevent
most businesses and governments from implementing risk management.
Seed Corn
While job loses due to offshore projects can be
devastating, the long term effect is worse.
Do you send redundant
messages to co-workers to be sure at least one gets through? Welcome to
the Tell-Me Trap. In this reprint from the April 2003 issue of 'People on
Projects', we take a humorous yet disturbing look at the confusion caused
by all of our electronic communications options. To help you escape this
trap, we provide ideas on steps you can take to streamline your teams'
communications.
Moving from a legacy product
or IT system to its replacement is a challenging task. If the old system
is ineffective, the motivation is clear. But the major challenge is to
replace a successful product or system when your strategic planning and
competitive intelligence say that you must.
Everyone will tell you to
build a prototype and then throw it away. With mechanical design, it’s
done routinely; with electronics, we plan on it. But entire methodologies
have been designed to make sure that your software prototype is saved.
Calculating ROI on projects is a great
concept. Unfortunately in practice, it is more likely to harm a business
than help it.
Project planning reality is
that everything is an estimate. This trap is set by executives; where
leadership power collides with good intentions and project uncertainty.
This article describes how well-intending businesses enter this trap, and
how to avoid it.
The Technology Trap is set
when you have happy customers, a successful product, a profitable
business, well managed projects, excellent portfolio management, and your
competitors are starting to nip at your heels. With the best of
intentions, taking great care of your current customers can lead to your
downfall.
‘Mind Mapping’ is a great
visual tool made better since you can transfer project plans between
visual maps and Microsoft Project. This provides a quick way to turn
requirements into a project design or provide a new way to analyze an
existing project.
People sometimes confuse 'not agreeing'
with 'not understanding the context'. The right amount of context is
critical, too much and you lose the audience, too little and the
conversation can be pointless. Here are some ideas on the importance of
context as it relates to Internet-based collaborative tools and offshore
development.
I want to introduce a new
word into your project management vocabulary; herding. Herding can happen
when all of your best-intentioned team building runs out of control.
Your want to expand by
taking your products and services to global markets. Lots of customers,
new opportunities for growth, the excitement of the multi-national. Great
idea! The reality is much harder as 'The International Trap' awaits. Are
you clever enough to avoid it?
I don’t know if you received my last email. Unfortunately
you have the same problem with emails that you send to your project team.
Sometimes projects last say beyond when they should be
stopped. This issue presents some ideas on how to step up to the decision
to stop a project, and some views on why you should not.
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