Category Archives: On Project Management

Thoughts on Project and Program Management

Wicked Problems

I’m a process guy, a disciple of Lean, Agile, Six Sigma and Empirical Process Control. But I’m also a contrarian, a critic of those same disciplines because they too often focus on so called best practices, usually in the form … Continue reading

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A Visual Tool for Large Group Facilitation

Problem Statement: A school board which has not agreed to an increase in recommended levy funding in 16 years. A community which regularly votes down the levy funding requests recommended by the board. A school system which is largely under … Continue reading

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Blue Wall Project Planning

Project management tools can be a great help in managing a project. They assist in workload balancing, help identify critical path, and help visualize project execution. One thing I’ve never found they do well is helping the elicitation process for … Continue reading

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Keeping Focus in Project Meetings

Have you ever had the experience in project meetings where, when your task list is projected on a screen, you get three or four people talking about a particular task, possibly heatedly, only to find that they are really talking … Continue reading

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Visual Management for Complex Requirements Management

How many of your project meetings are actually content free talking head sessions?  How do you move from content free gatherings to purposeful meetings which facilitate rich dialog.  One way to do so is to focus on data rich visualizations.

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The Whiteboard Dance

The White Board Dance refers to the power of kinesthetic interactions often found in white board planning session as compared to project planning using software tools alone. This is the story of how one nuclear power plant tried to go … Continue reading

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Strategic Planning Framework

Show as a single page The Goal of Strategic Planning There is a story told inside Hewlett-Packard about Dave Packard, one of the founding partners of Hewlett-Packard Company. In the late 1940s he was at a meeting with executives from … Continue reading

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Adaptive Project Management

Adaptive Project Management is, at it’s core, the art and science of solving complex problems by getting the right people talking about the right things at the right time. There is more to Adaptive Project Management than this statement suggests … Continue reading

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