Tag: project advice
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You are not an IT Project Manager. You are not a CIO. How you are so much more!
I was with a Project Manager friend, Steve, for a catch up this week when an old friend walked into the coffee house we were in. I introduced the old friend, Liz, to Steve and invited her to join us. After a few minutes, Liz asked Steve, “So, what do you do?” What would you…
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First Quarter Done. How IT Project Trends So Far Are Shaping Up
First Quarter Done. How IT Project Trends So Far Are Shaping 2018 As I write this we are rapidly approaching the end of quarter one. I cannot believe how quickly the year is zooming by. With the first quarter under our belts, I’ve noticed three distinct IT Project Management trends that I think are exciting…
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A change is as good as unrest. How to engage disengaged stakeholders
A change is as good as a rest, so the old saying goes. Recently, it has struck me, that change can actually be a precursor to unrest, at least with some IT Change Projects. While reviewing one customer’s challenges, I identified that it wasn’t scope creep that was impacting the project, nor was it any…
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Why IT Projects Shouldn’t Be Sheepish About BAaaS
Picture a Project Manager, a full team and a Business Analyst … on every project. IT Project Nirvana. Budgets are tight so often it’s the latter that either gets sacrificed, usually merged into someone else’s role. Many Project Managers have in the past, had parts of their job description that look more ‘BA’ than ‘PM’,…
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How IT Project Management can make you a millionaire
That’s right! How IT Project Management can make YOU a millionaire. Er, I suppose, during your lunch break, you could buy a lottery ticket. Did you expect more from the header of this post? Did I build your expectation unrealistically? Apologies, it’s more than a devious bit of click-bait though. In IT Project Management, the temptation to…
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Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good Projects?
I was inspired by a recent Facebook post by a friend who asked, in a status update, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Within minutes, dozens of replies appeared, all along the lines of “You OK hun?” or “How can I help?”. She’s fine by the way, just wondering why despite best efforts,…
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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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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,…