With the rise of social media, the last few years has produced a glut of project management tools and software. I’ve been paying close attention to what’s out there and have written about it before. Largely lumped under the moniker “PM2.0″, these tools [...]

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So, presenting at the PM Telesummit was a fabulous experience, and I’ve made a lot of really great connections as a result. One thing that has happened, is that I’ve been asked to develop a workshop on “what I do”.

“Well holy crap,” I thought. “What the hell [...]

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In 2000, a the height of the dot com craze, I was contracted to build an e-commerce site. I had three months basically to build a portal for online trading of bonds, money market and foreign exchange products, translate it into six different Asian languages, and get it [...]

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The Curators of Creation

On January 11, 2011 By

When I was a child, there was wonder to be had pretty much everywhere. There was Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, unicorns and fire-breathing dragons. My parents were rich storytellers and when my sister and I would ask how things came to be, they had a talent for infusing us with a genuine sense of possibility.

As we grew older, we broke the boundaries of parental control. We did more things on our own. We watched more TV, read more books, interacted with friends, and reached out into the world to inform ourselves. As we exposed ourselves to more and more and more noise, it started to drown out the magic and possibilities we learned as children. Somewhere along the line, noise obscured the magic completely.

Thus we entered the workforce.

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We already see a threshold system in the workplace: they’re called salary bands. The chief difference between game progression and a salary raise is, in gaming, the move from one threshold to the next is consistent, predictable, and well-known. If you want to get to the next level (and reap the powers and rewards of that level), then you need x number of points, have to have finished x number of achievements, or whatever the game demands of you. You know this ahead of time, and the rules don’t change halfway through. In the workplace, let’s be honest, this isn’t the case. For the most part, moving from one band to the next has more to do with your relationship with your employer than anything specific or measurable.

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Over the last year (really even before that), an interesting trend has arisen, towards bridging the gap between the real world and the world of video games. For those not familiar with this concept, it’s called “Gamification”, and it’s the application of video game mechanics and concepts to areas outside the video game industry.

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I received a mail the other day from a reader who had a project “fail” and was concerned how that affected his reputation. I thought it was a great question, so I’m going to share my thoughts here.

First of all, I believe “failed” is a very subjective term. If you’re going to talk about [...]

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In a much earlier post, I mentioned I’d had the unique opportunity to work on outsourcing projects both from the buy side, and from the sell side. Today I want to talk a bit about that, and explain why I feel outsourcing is just an awful idea, and hurts [...]

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