All Shapes and Sizes
I spent a few years facilitating an award winning PM Certificate program in Vancouver, up to about a year ago. One of the things that astounded me in that program (and I’m sure the scenario plays out elsewhere as well) is that on the first day, most of the students were looking for a standard set of templates and a recipe for project success.
I guess I astounded them right back when I said “Nope, sorry”. Here’s my reasoning. Read more
An Outside Perspective
In a consulting role for the past 12 years, I’ve worked with organizations from an outside perspective. Whether mentoring project teams in an academic environment, performing due diligence for a venture capital firm, or facilitating key team discussions, the value that I bring from the outside is something that is difficult to replace. Here’s my view on the synergy produced by this relationship. Read more
Reductio ad Absurdum
I got a note recently from someone halfway across the world, asking about a detail in my white paper about quantifying the quality requirements of a system. The query me ponder for a moment before I came up with a reasonable response, but I think it highlighted something that applies in a broader sense as well. Read more
Working the Fundamentals
With all the time we have watching our kids in their activities this fall, a pattern begins to emerge. All of these activities involve practice and drills intended to improve proficiency in fundamentals of each activity: dribbling and passing in soccer and basketball, scales and chord progressions in guitar, footwork drills and off-ice practice in figure skating. While the kids generally loathe this portion of their activities, there’s a good reason for this: they are working the fundamentals. Read more
Deadlines and Commitments
While some projects absolutely must be high quality, and others might be physically constrained by size, there is one dimension that is clearly the most prominent point of discussion on projects of all shapes and sizes: When must it be finished? Read more
Expertise vs. Teamwork
We were working through a project management workshop that I have blogged about in the past, where we have a fun blend of theory and practice centred around a brief construction project. With more than enough resources to go around, we decided to try to design an experiment for the last round that might help answer the question of which is more valuable: expertise or teamwork? Read more
Evolving Perspectives
Filed under: Agility, Leadership, Process, Quality, Teamwork
It seems that at any point in time, the current beliefs we hold to be true are sacrosanct. We are entirely convinced that we are correct as we use these beliefs to guide our way through life. It also seems that if we look back in time, whether that is 50 years ago, twenty years ago or only five, we can identify some beliefs that were powerful then and laughable now. Can we learn anything from this? Read more
From Training to Education
It is interesting to see what happens at some point in almost every workshop I run. Just after talking about some topic, often a topic where I get up on a soapbox and go off on a rant that takes us well beyond the standard training fare, I’ll have a few people come up to me at the next break. Almost in unison, they suggest that their managers need to hear what I had to say about this topic. For me, it’s an indication of the difference between training and education. Read more
Certification vs. Education
Way back in 1939, the great and powerful Oz had this to say to the Scarecrow, who was in search of a brain:
“Why, anybody can have a brain, that’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pucilanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.
Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have.
But they have one thing you haven’t got – a diploma.
Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatis Committeatum, E. pluribus unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D. (Doctor of Thinkology).”
Receiving that piece of paper didn’t make the scarecrow any smarter, as evidenced by his screwing up pythagorean and isosceles triangle theorems. He clearly received an empty credential.
More than seventy years later, we still struggle to recognize the distinction between certification and education. Read more
Best Intentions
We’ve all been in situations where we find ourselves slogging through our work, and the focus (if there is any focus at all) is to get the work done, rather than get it done well. Certainly household chores can fall into that category, and around the office there are similar activities like month-end reporting that can feel more like drudgery than uplifting activity. It becomes easy to find excuses for not getting the work done, procrastination becomes an art form, and while the result might pass muster, it certainly isn’t a masterpiece. When the core work we do starts to feel this way, when we just want it done and over with, it’s time to rethink what’s going on. Read more
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