Project Management

Archive for May, 2010

Call it a pet peeve. Call it an annoyance. Call it B.S. Call it lying. Call it what you will, but in my career, a ‘best practice’ rarely lives up to its label. If there is one phrase I think needs to die, or at least needs to stop being so sorely abused, it is this one. It is not that there is no such thing as a best practice, but its how this phrase is used and who uses it that so frustrates me. What should have been an objective measure of the capability of a process has now been hijacked to be a marketing catch-phrase.

Stakeholders, too!

But its not just sales or consulting teams who misuse this phrase; our business users can be nearly as bad. Usually when I hear a project stakeholder bring up this subject, they are doing so out of a desire to better understand what they should be doing in their business area. Its good to have a stakeholder who is trying to find ways to make their teams more effective in their duties, but asking a vendor this question only perpetuates the problems already mentioned. Its like asking the proverbial fox to watch the proverbial hen house. A vendor is only going to tell you how they do it right and build a case for why you should do it their way.

Another way stakeholders get into trouble by asking after best practice is to have a faulty assumption about what a best practice is. The question is asked in such a way as to lead to a specific, singular answer, but it is rarely that cut and dry. Consider if you will the concept of customer relationship management. How would you design a single best-practice for all companies? Or even for a single industry? What about a single market? This is an absurd question to ask because there frankly is no ‘right’ way. Yes, some ways are better than others, but the ‘best’ way depends upon not only who your customers are but on how you manage customers internally to your business. A ‘best practice’ for one company could be diametrically opposed to a ‘best practice’ for another company in the exact same industry.

A third failure stakeholders often face when confronting best practice is assuming that anyone can really tell them what it should be for their business. That’s not to say vendors can not help, they most definitely can help, but they are there to advise, not design for you. Stakeholders who don’t have well defined process and don’t want to take the time to map out what they need often look for a vendor who is willing, for a usually exorbitant amount of money, to do the work for the stakeholder. This frees up the stakeholder to focus on managing their current business without all the time and heavy thinking required to actually create a process that fits their needs.

So what really makes up a best practice? Check back soon for part 2 of this blog to find out that information!

After being gone for some time I will start with a light management post So let’s get going. F

A lot of technology and application specialists who used to spearhead management IT projects from be

A 2008 Gartner report stated that 1 out of 3 IT projects either had high cost variance or were late. Therefore, managing project risk is critical. In this article, read three risk management rules that’ll help you in managing project risk for effective project management risk reduction. Managing Project Risk Managing project risk is an inevitab…

My first team as a Microsoft Developer kicked some serious butt. We shouted at each
other, we used the F-word
rather generously and when that did not work, we raised our volumes to a level
that would blow the office roof sky high.

Then when the fight was over and the best solution had won, we would go out and have
lunch together with no hard feelings.

That was my understanding of strong
opinions and disagreement.

These were two very useful tools to reach the best of solutions. During my times at Multiplitaxion
Inc, I often tended to respect guys who had strong
opinions weekly held and had  the
conviction or the spine to disagree with me.

Disagreement was loud.

Disagreement was a good idea-validation-check.

Disagreement was good.

It was only during the later part of my career that I bumped into a different form
of disagreement that confused me and left me totally dumbfounded.

Ladies and gentleman, if you haven’t met ‘Silent Disagreement’ you are one lucky son
of a gun.

If you have, you know exactly what I am talking about.

This is a form of disagreement where someone sits smack across the table to you in
a meeting,
nods his head in agreement to everything you have to say and then goes out and does
just the opposite.

Consider an arbitrary example for instance. Assume that everyone in  your organization,
starting from the lowest programmer fresh out of college, all the way up to the chief-executive-officer
agree on having a free open internet access policy.

You call the group who is responsible for maintaining the restrictions on firewall
in a meeting where
you tell them to drop all restrictions from non-work related sites like Facebook or
You-Tube. You are going to trust your employees work ethics more than a firewall,
you tell them.

Everyone nods in agreement.

You wait for the firewall policies to change and Facebook to get unblocked. Nothing
happens. Days later someone higher up in the management sends a flame mail, asking
that all sites be unblocked immediately, and everything gets unblocked, only to get
re-blocked a couple of days later.

You call another meeting to
discuss what went wrong here. Did we disagree on something? Did we not collectively
decide that we were going to have an open internet policy? Did we not agree on that?
Didn’t we waste an entire day discussing the pros and cons on having free internet
and trusting
your employees versus blocking non-work-related sites?

Strangely enough, even in this meeting, everyone agrees to the idea of an open internet
policy.

Strangely enough, non-work related site still remain locked down.

It is then that you realize, that you are not dealing with rational, thinking, objective
individuals who believe in strong opinions weakly held. You are up against folks who
take every argument personally, folks who indulge in strong flavors of mitigated
speech and folks who do not express their disagreement in words but instead choose
to disagree, silently.

During my career as a software developer I have seen countless examples of silent
disagreements. I have seen examples of folks who think that they should say ‘no’ to
their managers but who lack the spine to say ‘no’ to their managers on their face,
so they resort to silent disagreement. I have also seen folks who think that they
are working for the ‘best
interest of the organization’ and use silent disagreement to avoid all arguments
or discussions.

Assuming that you can bring about change in your organization, if there is just one
thing that you can change, I suggest you put an instant stop to silent disagreement
within your organization. This is another one of those issues that you are way better
of confronting
rather than avoiding.

Go on, confront the folks who tend to disagree silently, and demand an open objective
argument or total agreement through not just words, but action.

I wish you good luck.

Quality in Project Management – Zircona or a Diamond?
By Barney Austen
What determines quality? A diamond to some can look like a piece of glass to another. Quality means different things to different people. From a project management perspective though, it has to me measurable – otherwise how can we determine whether the project attained one [...]