Posted by: Bruce Carney | November 20, 2009

Project Demotivator Checklist

Here is a useful checklist I found in the book eXtreme Project Management.

Reasons for low desire

Reasons for low confidence

[ ] Been there, done that. Already working 60hr weeks.

[ ] The team doesn’t have the skills.

[ ] Don’t see the business value for the project.

[ ] People are spread too thin; competing priorities.

[ ] My role is unlcear.

[ ] Project Manager has a dubious track record.

[ ] Little or no say in how the project is run.

[ ] Unrealistic goals.

[ ] High risk to my career.

[ ] Project too complex.

[ ] Don’t like the people on the team.

[ ] Project not politically favored.

[ ] too much project management bureaucracy.

[ ] We have a high project failure rate [on this type of project].

[ ] They kill the messenger around here.

[ ] Sponsor is not a champion; weak.

[ ] I don’t have the skills.

[ ] Customer is not committed.

[ ] No faith in suppliers or other departments to deliver what we need.

[ ] Poorly run meetings.

[ ] Key issues and decisions go unresolved.

[ ] Insufficient support systems.

[ ] Physical environment not conducive.

Leave a Comment

Posted in BMCs-Coaching Corner (Work, Life and Sport) | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Bruce Carney | November 15, 2009

The Big Five

From today’s newspaper on how to combat obesity in children, as recommended by Westmead’s Family & Lifestyle In Partnership (FLIP) program:-

1. Eating Breakfast most days.
2. No more than 2hrs screen time per day.
3. Eating at least one meal a day together at the table, without TV.
4. Being active outside everyday.
5. Choosing water as the main drink.

Leave a Comment

Posted in Ideas, Thoughts and Spurious information | Tags: ,

Posted by: Bruce Carney | February 6, 2009

Managing a Crisis

The ability to stay calm and focused in a moment of sheer crisis by the pilot and copilot of the US Airways plane crash into the Hudson River really deserves a shoutout. I am simply amazed at the skill of how these guys managed this crisis.

Released today, I was listening to the conversation between the controller and the pilot available here:-

Whilst most of the media has focused (quite rightly) on the heroics of the pilots, it is really worth listening to the air traffic controller “debugging” the situation (transcript here).

1. Offer an immediate solution:-

“OK, yeah, you need to return to Laguardia. Turn left heading of uh, 2-2-0.”

2. Communicate to others in the team quickly:-

“Tower, stop your departures. We got an emergency returning.”
“He lost thrust in both engines, he said.”

3. Start thinking of a contingency plan:-

“Cactus 1529, if we can get it to you, do you want to try to land runway 1-3?”
“All right cactus 1549. It’s going to be a left. Traffic to runway 3-1.”

And the line I like the most in this entire conversation. When all else was failing to check-in with the people closer to the crisis:-

“OK, what do you need to land?”

As it turned out this was in, software speak, a Severity 1 crisis, and there was nothing the controller, Patrick Harten, could do to help. But he certainly showed every attribute you would expect in a crisis manager, so I’ll send a shoutout to him as well…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Uncategorized | Tags:

Posted by: Bruce Carney | August 7, 2008

10 Types of People?

Leave a Comment

Posted in Technology | Tags:

Posted by: Bruce Carney | July 29, 2008

Currency of Collaboration

I have recently been managing a cross functional/multi site project, which creates an interesting dynamic in terms of ensuring successful collaboration.

A question arose of how to measure successful collaboration via hard data, rather than rating/opinion. My initial thoughts, were that following things occur (and increase) with collaboration.

  • Number of visits/flights between sites
  • Meetings held involving people from more than one sites (usually = conference calls)
  • Phone Calls
  • Instant messenger of discussion forum usage

However, to get to a single metric, I concluded that the atomic “transaction” of collaboration nowadays is measurable by the number/type of emails flowing between collaborators. Travel, meetings, forums are arguably higher level abstractions…Hence my metric (as I can only have one) would be:-

Successful Collaboration occurs if: The average¹ number of emails sent/received where recipients are from different team/site increases² by X% over time period.

  1. Average is used here to gauge the impact to the average person (or average inbox) to simplify measurement?
  2. Measurable by either random sampling OR selecting appropriate “target” people to benchmark.

Of course, email isn’t always the best tool (see my earlier post on BMCs rules for (ab)use of email). Higher forms of communications are definitely advised and if you probably need a second qualitative metric, but even the higher forms of communcation all impact the bottom line; i.e. the relative number of emails sent between collaborators in cross function and/or multi site situations. Hence, I think I’ll trial this as a KPI for a while as my “Currency of Collaboration”.

Leave a Comment

Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: , , ,

Older Posts »

Categories