Tag: IT Project Management
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At harvest time what can IT project managers learn from farmers?
I was fascinated this week by a farmer in a combine harvester going up and down in a field adjacent to the road I was driving along. I pulled over to watch … it’s a man and machines thing! The farmer pulled over too and we briefly talked about the vehicle he was driving. I…
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IT Projects. Do We Actually Ever Learn Lessons Learnt?
Originally published on CIO.com We record ‘lessons learnt’ as part of the project management process but do we actually learn from them? Recent experience and the number of projects that fail to deliver suggest we could probably all do better at learning from lessons learnt. It is worth considering this for a moment … Do…
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7 Reasons why IT Project Managers were born to blog
“You’re so passionate about Project Management, you should write a blog about it,” one of my colleagues said a couple of years back. That’s how it started. I wrote one blog and then, having found it quite enjoyable, I wrote a second and then a third. I got some nice feedback, got shared, had a…
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Eight Advantages a Specialist IT Recruiter Gives To Your Business
“Talent supply remains the number one challenge facing digital tech businesses in the UK”, this according to Tech Nation’s 2017 survey. It found that over half (55%) of employers said THIS was their main business challenge. According to Robert Half, the tech talent shortage is “no longer just an inconvenience for employers — it’s quickly…
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Managing IT Projects: Respond Don’t React
In IT Projects, when something unexpected happens, I get better results when I respond, than when I react. You may have sussed this for yourself ages ago but my epiphany, strangely, came when I met a St John Ambulance community first responder. He was telling me about a traffic accident that he’d attended. He was…
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Who needs a PMO?
I was reminded of an old Monty Python sketch today. Did you ever see Life of Brian? One of the characters Reg, played by John Cleese, asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?” One by one, other characters pipe up with loads of suggestions … medicine … roads … public order … Eventually,…
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How to deal with what wasn’t in the IT project handover
Have you ever taken on an IT Project, only to find that a major challenge either wasn’t mentioned in the handover from the departing Project Manager or, if it was, it was implicit – not explicit. It’s like those horror movies where a family buys a house only to find out, after they move in,…
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Straight Talk on Project Management VOLUME II – Free E-Book
With the success of my first eBook, I am delighted to publish Volume II. The book covers a wealth of topics from Stonseed’s Project Management as a Service and our IT services, to an array Project and Programme Management issues. Volume II of Straight Talk on Project Management is now available for download as an…
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WARNING! Don’t ignore the IT project warning signs
I was sitting on the M1 in traffic the other day, the gantry lights above were displaying a huge red X above the inside lane, signifying that it was closed due to an accident. Most cars got over into another lane as soon as it was safe for them to do so. However, three lorries…
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How to be assertive and why IT project leaders must be
“Beware of Jim, he’s a bit of an ogre!” I was once warned about a project leader at a new firm I had joined. Jim wasn’t the chap’s real name, by the way, and “ogre” wasn’t quite the word that was used. Anyway, it turned out that “Jim” wasn’t really an “ogre”. He was just…