I’d like you to meet my most important stakeholder. His name is Harold. Okay, mainly this is just an opportunity to show off how awesome he is, but there’s a point in here, I promise. Earlier this week, I had the unfathomable joy of eating a poppy seed bagel, biting down, and having a single, tiny poppy seed shatter a rear molar. To say I was in, um, excruciating agony would be an understatement, especially as the shards of the tooth still remaining were shredding the inside of my mouth like a Japanese shuriken. It was kind of awful.
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I recently came across an opinion piece by Liza Lowery Massey called Poor Project Management Dooms Many IT Projects.
I really liked it. She had some great points in the face of high rates of IT project failure, and inconsistencies between best practices and poor results. What particularly resonated with me [...]
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So, people keep telling me that multitasking is an effective management technique, and I keep insisting that it isn’t. When one thing has your attention, you’re not paying attention to the other things on your plate. Until now I’ve never had an effective demonstration.
It took me awhile to track down legitimate embed code for [...]
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The poor Terrier really means well. Always searching, they are full of purpose. And when they recognize a problem, they will latch on to it tooth and nail, dissecting it and re-dissecting it until you wouldn’t think there was another way you could possibly look at it. The trouble with Terriers is, they have a lot of trouble letting go. Even bigger trouble for Terriers is, while they’re fixated, they can’t see anything else that’s going on.
Read more and share your opinion →…That company was not atypical of any other company I’ve worked for. It was no more or less dysfunctional than other environments I’ve seen. And in our contemporary environments we pump our people full of inspirational propaganda about taking initiative and empowering themselves at the same time we yank the carpets out from under them. We tell them that a lousy 4th quarter meant a tiny bonus pool in the same presentation we tell our shareholders we reported record profits. We tell them we’d reward them if they’d take more ownership of their work, and then throw the act of reviewing to the peers they compete with…
Read more and share your opinion →So I opened The Mentor Room in the sidebar over the weekend. Since one of my goals with this blog is to inspire you, I thought I’d pick through Amazon and make some recommendations on resources to do just that. Every couple days, I’ll write up a new review of something I’ve chosen [...]
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Welcome to part two of my series on destructive project manager behaviours. Last time we looked at abdication of responsibility. I called a manager who demonstrated this “The Sack“, because they let themselves be carried along by others on their project. I rated the behaviour as “Dangerous”: a Sack basically cuts the head off his or her project, but because others invariably come to the rescue, collateral damage of this behaviour is lessened.
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I'm Geoff Crane. After 22 years in the trenches of a lot of tough projects, I decided to change direction a little bit and focus on sparking ideas in the vibrant field of project management.
If you're a project manager, or even if you're one voice in the project choir, you are in a position to be truly remarkable. Without exaggerating, you have within you the capacity to change the world, just because of who and where you are!
How do you access that part of yourself? Please get my free project leadership advice and free ebook "Nine Destructive Behaviours" and join my rapidly growing community!
