Project Junction

I’ve been buried by a blizzard of emails from a manager who always requests that the task/deliverable be completed “Today.” The “today” prompt shows up in variety of amusing ways. The funniest variant was the note written at 10:00 pm requesting that a trivial assignment be completed “tomorrow.” Of course, when I [...]

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MS Project assumes that you are loading a “closest to the pin” estimate for task duration. fn That means the duration has a 50% chance of coming in ahead of schedule and a 50% chance of finishing late. There’s a twist to this game that many project managers fail to recognize: Very few people give [...]

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EA sports designed a brilliant football video game with a feature called “momentum.” After you score or force an interception momentum shifts your way. With momentum your players are a bit sharper, you drop fewer passes, and you make bigger hits. You hear the term momentum discussed regularly during sporting events. Have you ever [...]

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Have you ever said to yourself, “Nothing good happened today?”
You were wrong.
Discuss.

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I’m using my vacation sabbatical to consolidate my thoughts about web design. Here’s a link to my draft report.  Click Here
The wordle below visually depicts the concepts I’m exploring.

This report is open to collaboration. I consider it a work-in-process so if you have any thoughts or opinions of your own, please share them with [...]

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“It will take two weeks,” a wonk(fn) told me last week.
“Why?” I asked
“That’s our process. It is documented,” the wonk answered.
Only that really isn’t an answer, is it? It is more like a brush off.  A better response might be, “I wasn’t sitting on my hands waiting for you to pass me work … I’ve [...]

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Team’s become disillusioned when they spin endlessly trying to make a decision. Just this week I heard someone say, “Let’s wait 12 months to collect actual data to see how we are trending before we make this decision.” Really? Since the first three months of data already show that we are running far below plan, [...]

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A colleague at work commented, “You are the most efficient project manager I know. You’re always in control.”

He obviously hasn’t seen me walk my dog, Andy. My dog is a pig headed bull terrier that drags me along on his walk every day. I’ve used every PM soft skill technique I know to coax him [...]

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Folks,
If you attended the worldwide conference call last night, I’d appreciate your direct feedback.
+  What went well?
++  What could be improved?
Here’s the slide deck for reference.
Are you a 97 pound PM weakling?
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: softskills leadership)

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Tim Roberts was crowned the 2008 Software Design champion at the TopCoder Open at the Mirage Resort in Las Vegas on May 8th. You didn’t see him on the nightly news. He isn’t dating a supermodel. He’s just an unassuming guy who knows how to design and code software.
Tim is the guy [...]

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