Focus on the Craft
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell provides a rule of thumb that people will get good at their craft after they have spent 10,000 hours plying it. He talks about the Beatles and their years in small clubs in Germany, Mozart and his long tenure in music, and describes the early years of Bill Joy and Bill Gates as well. I’ve heard similar 250,000 word rules for writing (I’m well past that mark and think there’s still lots to learn), and the practice time put in by some of the sports greats is legendary. Seems there is something to all this: that time – lots of time – is an important part of becoming good at something. Raw talent or innate genius will only get you so far. Read more
High Cost of Success
Filed under: Leadership, People, Project management, Quality
In all kinds of projects, despite all the theory behind project management best-practices or ‘branded’ methodologies or lifecycles, I would say that the majority of projects get done with more than a little ‘seat-of-the-pants’ effort. In construction circles you will see ‘as built’ notations on the drawings, in many projects you will see a lot of scurrying, sprinkled with some long hours, and a dash or so of frayed nerves. The project gets done, we declare success, but at what cost? Read more
What’s That PMO Doing?
I was running a workshop on project management yesterday, and one of the first things I did (as usual) was to go around the room to ask what people were looking for in the session. One person volunteered that back on their project, they have a PMO that drives things, and what he wanted to get out of the session was to “find out what goes on behind those doors”. I may not know what does go on behind those doors, but I do have thought or two to share. Read more
Intentional Influence
An important consideration in projects is that, consciously or not, we all exert influence on those around us. If we are trying to make life on our projects better, we certainly effect the behaviour of others, as well as their character. We can influence them. Read more
What Drives Us
What motivates you? Chances are that it is not one particular thing but a mix of a wide range of things. Chances are even greater that if you look at the other people on your team, their mix of important motivators are quite different from yours. If we know what motivates us in our environment, we can behave in a manner that feeds these motives and results in a much more rewarding experience. Read more
The Rule of Three
When I first started focusing on improvement initiatives (over a dozen years ago now), the typical approach was to perform a deep analysis and come up with a big laundry list of recommended changes. That never did much more than pad the wallets of the consulting firm that provided the recommendations. For that reason alone, I’m sure the approach won’t be going away soon. For the improvee, though, the victim of these massive recommendations, there remains hope for a better way. Apply the Rule of Three. Read more
A New Year, A New Start
A year ago, I wrote about dealing with difficult times as a means of driving appropriate change. A year later, unfortunately, the same message holds essentially unchanged. For many organizations (those that are still working to make it through these times), we are at a point where we get a second shot at starting the New Year on the right foot. Here’s another business perspective, but it isn’t aimed at your employer. Read more
Working with People You Hate
Quite often, there are situations where a couple of teammates have stepped on each other’s toes too many times. While the easy way out might be to go find another team, this is not always possible. How to continue to work with someone you currently loathe? Read more
Top of Mind
A few months ago, I posted some data that suggests that when we compare performance against different approaches to developing software, no particular brand stands out. Each approach appears to provide some net value in some area of performance, but there is no clear winner in the broad-based “this is the best way to develop our products” competition. There might be a couple of well known effects at play here. Read more
Simplify
One of the greatest challenges with conflict is that by the time we deal with many issues, after there has been some unbearable situation that forces us to do something, the conflict has become a gnarly hairball of different issues, some actually related to each other. In many situations, trying to find a solution to the conflict as it presents itself is impossible. Instead, try to divide and conquer. Read more
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