Precision With a Wide, Moving Target
One of the requests that I don’t think will ever go away in training and mentoring is the request for a recipe. Many people in this YouTube world of short attention spans aren’t interested in taking the time to understand topics in depth, they just want to know what will work, and simply apply it. Sorry, but I don’t think that makes for things more complex than chocolate brownies or IKEA furniture. Read more
Pitching Value
For almost all of the projects that I have seen, the most difficult challenge for the project manager is to be able to clearly express what the expected value for the project will be for the sponsor. Without this, though, all that you are proposing is to spend some someone’s money in a given time period. Read more
Rotten Carrots
In a recent TED Talk, Dan Pink waxed eloquently about the ‘surprising science of motivation‘, describing the problems with how we run our businesses. I agree with what he has to say, and would take it even one step further. Read more
Attacking Technical Debt
Two of the artifacts of incremental or iterative development are that you tend to use scaffolding as you go to prop up the product, and you tend to build similar capabilities in several different locations. Over time these can add up to quite a bit of cruft, or technical debt. Read more
Balancing Cool with Necessity
Very often, for an established business or for one struggling to enter an existing market space, the biggest challenge is how to balance those features which are expected in that domain of products with those that will set the business apart from the competition. How well that tightrope is walked often makes or breaks the perceived value of the product, and sometimes the overall success of business. Read more
Insourcing
I received an e-mail recently from someone that had taken a requirements course with me in the past. He was looking for wording to use for an RFP to bring in some external consultant to wrangle the requirements of one of their systems together. Expectations were in the 2-6 person-months range, likely a contract that would entice some of the big players to bid on the proposal. I had no suggestions that directly addressed his needs, but did have some thoughts on what could be more effective. Read more
Delivering Value
It is hard enough to get a project team to focus on delivery of value when we are initiating a project, but it is all that much tougher to remain focused on this prize as the project plays out. I would argue that the main reason for this is that the tools we use to manage projects tend to divert our focus. Read more
Blurring the Boundaries
We have been running our own small business for more than 7 years now, and from most accounts, everything is running quite smoothly. While the pipeline has thinned a little as training budgets are slashed, there are indications that even this is turning around. Receivables have been very good, something that I would attribute to personally knowing who cuts the cheque in most places (the biggest challenges have come from the biggest vendors, where I am an anonymous ‘little guy’ with no apparent clout, but I have my ways to get things done there as well…). There remains one area that I struggle with – the traditional boundaries of the workplace. Read more
Improvement Cost?
I was talking to a couple of people last week about the situation in their organization. To cut a long story short, suffice it to say that there were plenty of symptoms of trouble, and management had settled in on the expectation that it was going to cost millions of dollars to clean things up. Once I got up from the floor, we talked about why I believe that an attitude like that will almost surely lead to disappointment. Read more
An Outdated Investment Model
For a number of reasons, I believe that the model used by many venture capital firms is in dire need of a retread. While the model has shown to be profitable in the past, this appears to be more a lucky, accidental result of circumstances rather than through proactive application of sound business principles. These thoughts here are based on my somewhat limited exposure to working with venture capital firms, certainly talking to others and following the news, but also sitting down with a couple of VC’s and walking through this. Read more
