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Are you an organised Project Manager? Do you care?

steph — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:48:56 +0000

I read this discussion with trepidation http://www.ronrosenhead.co.uk/?p=362

Am I a bad project manager because there is:
an empty plate on my desk
a few cups
a stray bangle (not sure where that’s from)
and a few random post-its that long ago lost their meaning?

Project Management is not a dot to dot science as some would have us believe. One doesn’t get points in project management for having a tidy desk and for being “organised”. Points are gained for delivery and delivery only.

Some project managers will get there in style (these people are what you call smart arses), some won’t make it at all and should probably choose a different career, some will have a lovely clean desk and a nice big project plan, (they don’t know this yet but they’ll be blaming everyone else when it all goes wrong). Meanwhile, some may get there with a few hairs out of place and their hands dirty from mucking in. The team might even invite those dirty hands to lift aloft the Webby award which arrives as a product of bloody hard work.

I know what kind of project manager I am and no Ron, I’m not sorry for the state of my desk. Not one bit.

BBC World Service Project Launch

annmcp — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:21:04 +0000

Magic Milestones has been celebrating along with the BBC World Service Future Media (WSFM) team the launch of the first part of the How and When to listen relaunch.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmeguide/waystolisten.shtml

The Ways to Listen page showcases the variety of ways through which people can access World Service content and clearly presents the multiple ways to listen, so that users are not purely reliant on one platform alone.

The How and When to Listen pages are currently some of the most visited, yet some of the most difficult to navigate - especially finding out how you can actually listen to the programmes from your chosen country which has now been resolved with the introduction of this page.

The brand new design provides an engaging and contemporary interface and more interactivity for users that will encourage more take up of programme content across the available platforms

The page is being hailed as a success and Magic Milestones received immediate praise from the BBC for their involvement in this project, adding to the ever-growing programme of work that Magic Milestones is delivering for WSFM.

The project, which commenced in March 2010, was managed end to end by Magic Milestones consultants.

Next to look forward to is the redesigned schedule information pages - coming soon!

Alternatives to Basecamp for more functionality

steph — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:35:09 +0000

http://pm-sherpa.com/features/basecamp-alternatives/

Most influential women of the 2000s

steph — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:17:38 +0000

Why Mo Mowlam?

5. She was a conduit for peace
4. She wore a wig with dignity
3. She made men listen
2. She never gave up
1. She was in it for the right reasons

Who is your most influential woman of the 2000s?

The power of goals

steph — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:37:35 +0000

I used to have a very good way of managing my own time.

I had a list in my head and every now and again I’d remember stuff that I needed to do and I’d do it. Don’t get me wrong, I always did my PM documentation but just didn’t manage my own tasks in the same way.

This made me a pretty good intuitive project manager and thankfully my memory was good enough to pull it off.

Then I got older…a little more forgetful..and I managed bigger projects… and more people. I progressed to writing my lists down.

My lists got too big, and my working life got too mobile so I progressed to using outlook. DOH - that didn’t work. I ended up just staring at a screen of red tasks. My husband swears by Outlook (so each to their own) but for me it just didn’t have enough manual dexterity to it.

Meanwhile, my personal life was getting pretty complicated. Moving cities, buying a house etc so I started keeping lists on my phone and tasks in my diary.

Then I started managing my own business…

I thought I had things fairly under control until one day I realised I had a list on my phone, a list on basecamp, a list on tactile AND a list on each of my many desks and…it went on!

I didn’t want to go so far as to say that lists didn’t work for me anymore but clearly something had to give.

It helped when I got my own desk. Just one solitary desk to manage, on which I could keep just one solitary piece of paper with one master list of tasks.

Then I realised one day that I had 45 tasks on my list and they were all due that day. So the nice concise list I had started with, was now spilling from a page of A4 onto post-its that stuck to my coffee cup and threatened to escape down the table-leg out into the corridor.

“This isn’t very Agile” I thought to myself.

Whilst pondering on Agile, I started to wonder why I had spent a great many years trying to manage my own time in a completely different way to the way in which I managed my team’s.

And then it hit me; I had been managing my own time in a soul destroying way. There was a chunk of time allocated (9 - 6pm) and I had to fill it with “stuff”. I was making endless lists that could have gone on forever (and what’s more), even if I came to the end of the list, if it wasn’t 6pm yet - I WOULD JUST KEEP GOING!

Like an Agile team with lots of Sprint Tasks but no Sprint Goal, I was just aimlessly churning out “stuff” until the customer (i.e. me) said that they were satisfied. As I’m quite hard to please, this would sometimes end up being 4am in the morning. So in fact, I wasn’t very good at time-boxing either!

Finally, I realised the power of goals. Every day, just one - and if that goal got done, my day was done too.

So now I have a goal in my head and every now and again I remember stuff that I need to do to complete my goal and I just do it. I cross it off my considerably smaller written list which was created not as a memory aid, but purely for the purpose of being able to triumphantly scribble it out.

I used to have a very good way of managing my own time. Now I don’t manage time at all… just my own expectations.

Read Timothy Ferris author of the 4 hour work week, on “why bigger goals are best and more achievable” here

I don’t proport to be the author of this idea of concentrating on goals rather than tasks and have almost certainly nicked it from Harvard. Three rather than one is certainly more ambitious and I find 2/3 often occurs. But if you (like me) don’t like failure, imagine the other two as back up “should have” goals Read more here

Things are getting silly now..

steph — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:17:00 +0000

When I set up Magic Milestones I never imagined for one moment that our team would consist entirely of Women.

There are 8 of us at the moment and we are all female.

Don’t get me wrong we ARE DIVERSE! Just not when it comes to the m/f split.

However, there are some major benefits for our clients in this state of affairs, which don’t go unnoticed…

1. In a very male dominated IT environment it helps to have a few females sprinkled about the place in order to keep the sport talk to a minimum if nothing else.
2. Geek women can talk tech whilst also being able to engage in “fluffy” conversational topics including (but not limited to) fashion, interior decor, cats, snowboarding? Etc…
3. Despite the bad press that female dominated work-forces get, women can actually work together pretty damn well when they put their mind to it!

However, it is potentially getting silly now… so chaps please feel free to send your CVs to enquiries@magicmilestones.biz and we promise to break the mold for the right person.

Come on… how scary can working alongside 8 female project managers possibly be?

The Six Thinking Hats

cindyedmonds — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:18:18 +0000

Someone tipped me off last year to a really useful technique. It may be one of those things that the rest of the world was aware of and I have been under a rock and missed it but in case there are some fellow rock-dwellers reading this blog I’m going to share the epiphany here. I’ve been working on a new business proposition over the past couple of weeks where it has been incredibly useful to apply this technique: Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.

The premise is that we all have a natural or preferred thinking style. For example, my thinking style is quite critical and ‘nit-picking’ whereas one of my colleagues is more optimistic and grandiose. When considering new business investments we need to apply both styles of thinking (and more) to the proposition to ensure we cover all bases. I’m sure everyone has worked with someone who you dread having a meeting with because they’re so negative or obstructive? I’m not saying I work with anyone like that right now but I have in the past and as a Project Manager it is imperative that I get the outcomes that I need from meetings and the Six Thinking Hats is a great enabler for this. (I have copied the following definitions from wikipedia)

Neutrality (White) - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
Feeling (Red) - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
Negative judgement (Black) - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
Positive Judgement (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
Creative thinking (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
Process control (Blue) - thinking about thinking

Six Hats Thinking means that in meetings, for example, the team considers the issues while imaginatively or figuratively wearing each of the Six Hats in turn. Some people stay quiet during Green Hat as they can’t think that way and then jump in with enthusiasm during Black Hat. Genius!

Which Hat are you?

Agile in the Enterprise

cindyedmonds — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:54:39 +0000

There is an exciting shift in the Project Management world from focussing on teams to moving our attention to the Enterprise. I am very excited about this because over time as a Project Manager you realise that you can arm yourself with skills, knowledge, certification and techniques and you can lead your teams and equip them with knowledge and freedom to work in a focussed and directed way and still hit obstacles that invariably lead back to the organisation. Both Prince2 and Agile practitioners are starting to think about how to address the organisational issues and how to scale methodologies to the enterprise.

Last week at Valtech’s Agile Edge conference Al Goerner gave a terrific key note session on Adapting Agile to the Enterprise. In explaining the maturing of Agile practice he outlined the two generations of Agile:

1st Generation - Agile for the team

Emphasising the Human Factors in development
Emphasising Empowerment-to-a-goal
A Gaggle of Gurus
Naive Agile and Faux Agile

2nd Generation - Agile for the Enterprise

Emphasising Risk Management
Emphasising Backlog Management
Emphasising Visibility and Accountability
Emphasising the Whole Solution Value Stream

The 2nd Generation of Agile practices really resonates with me and I’m sure resonates with any Project Manager who has worked in large organisations. How many of us have wrangled with the 1st Generation ‘Gaggle of Gurus’? I certainly have!

Managing risk and providing visibility and accountability is so important in the enterprise and I’m completely inspired by Al Goerner’s presentation on exactly these issues. His most important point was that Agile doesn’t mean not focussing on these things and it doesn’t mean not producing documentation and certain other claims made by the 1st Generation-ers. The key thing is to only do things that have a point, that will be read, and not just as a formality or because they’re ‘required’.

Beam me up Scotty!

Prince2 in the Enterprise

admin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:51:34 +0000

Agile practitioners are thinking about Agile in the Enterprise and Prince2 practitioners are doing the same. On September 30th I attended Project Challenge and heard Donnie MacNicol from Team Animation delivering a fantastic presentation on work he has done in collaboration with Andy Murray called ‘Beyond Prince2′. They have defined components for project success, which are:

Perspectives

Individual
Project Team
Organisation

Competencies

Technical
Behavioural
Contextual

They assessed Prince2 in each of these components. For example, from the individal perspective, how does Prince2 address Technical competency? How does it address Behavioural competency? Contextual? etc.

What they found was that Prince2 addresses the Technical competencies for the Individual and the Team very well. Ie., we all focus on ‘doing projects right’. The areas that are not addressed very well by Prince2 are the Behavioral Competence in the Organisation, and Contextual Competence in the Organisation. To elaborate, MacNicol and Murray identify the symptoms where the there are ‘issues’ in Contextual Competence in the Organisation.

Sector focus is incorrect
No higher level support
Fighting against the organisation to deliver the project

Sound familiar? They also suggest some solutions which sound pretty sound. Let me know if you want me to share them! (A bit of a test to see if anyone is out there…:-))

So, just as Agile practitioners are considering how to scale from the Team and Individual to the Enterprise, so are the Prince2 practitioners. As someone who uses both methodologies I find this very exciting as we are all now on the cusp of Second Generation of Project Management which is still a new profession, relatively speaking.

They also included a thought-provoking quote and I’ll reproduce it here for you to consider:

‘For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong’ H. L Mencken

The Six Thinking Hats

admin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:37:23 +0000

Neutrality (White) - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
Feeling (Red) - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
Negative judgement (Black) - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
Positive Judgement (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
Creative thinking (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
Process control (Blue) - thinking about thinking

Which Hat are you?