48 results for communication

  • I Second That Emotion

    About two years ago I had the experience of working on the vendor side of an outsourcing engagement of services from Canada to India. Those who know me know I’m not a fan of outsourcing (I’ve worked on multiple sides of it now), and I believe, with some exceptions, the purveyors of such services to be selling snake oil to […]

  • Papercut's *ahem* "Social Media Strategy" – Part 1

    Since I started embracing social media in November 2009, I’ve been amazed at the amount of leads and responses I’ve had. I basically started with a network of nobody, and suddenly I’m getting referrals on LinkedIn…people saying “you need to meet and talk with Geoff”. It’s early days yet, but considering I only started two months ago I call it […]

  • The Leader’s Barber Pole

    Leaders of all shapes and sizes know how difficult it is to keep their part of an organization running smoothly. In many cases, problems stem from breaks across the organization that could easily be solved with a simple model that shows where to look for guidance.

  • The 5 P’s of Managing a Stubborn Stakeholder.

    Experienced project managers are very familiar with the concept of stakeholders and the need to manage them effectively. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a project stakeholder is a person involved in a project (however marginally) who may influence the outcome of a project either positively or negatively. Identifying your project’s stakeholders is generally the first activity a project manager would undertake on agreeing to work on a project. Bringing these people in at the very beginning helps to grease the wheels of the project, and ensure it gets done on time, on budget, and within the scope constraints set in the charter.

  • When It’s All Going to Hell, Stop. Breathe. Listen.

    I wanted to take a moment today and tell a story about a fellow I worked with a few years back. I was on a monster of a project. Nine parallel software releases. Multiple counterparties, each with no less than fifty software interfaces. Old equipment prone to mechanical failure. Daily transactions in the millions. Software solely designed to address hardware malfunction. I joined the project because I thought I knew complex. Turned out I knew nothing—I may as well have fallen off the turnip truck the day before, I was in so far over my head.

  • Playing Jargon Scrabble kills puppies.

    Here’s the thing. I don’t know about anybody else, but if I don’t understand what you’re saying, I’m going to ask you to explain. I would say 8 times out of 10, no matter what someone says to me can be reduced down to a small handful of 4 and 5 letter words.

  • E-mail. It’s Broken. Stop Relying on It.

    Okay, rant time. Something that has bugged me on just about every project I’ve ever been on is the over dependence on e-mail. I’m going to use the word “you” a lot here. It’s not directed at you reading this per se but rather the people I’ve had to mercilessly beat with a club over the course of my career.

  • People first, work second

    In her article http://bit.ly/7aHl0I, @commsabilities talks of the importance of communication in a successful project. She says, ” at their heart projects and programmes are all about people”, and I believe she couldn’t be more right. Projects are about the people first, and the work second. It takes people to get the work done (the work by itself just sits like a lump waiting for a person to come along and do it). Each person involved in a project only knows what they know. As a project grows in complexity the number of people needed to perform the work increases. Each one of them brings extra pieces of knowledge crucial to the project’s success with them.