From the category archives:

Other people’s projects

IT projects need soft skills

July 19, 2007

This research by CIO Connect won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has had the slightest involvement in projects. Yes, IT projects fail without the element of business and people change. It amazes me that people still think in terms of ‘IT projects’ at all. Even a ‘pure’ IT project like an infrastructure upgrade [...]

Read more

Getting it right in government

June 20, 2007

The UK Government’s Public Accounts Committee has put together a report called ‘Delivering successful IT-enabled business change,‘ about how government projects are performing.  The report concludes that some projects actually turn out pretty well, but those learnings are not carried across to other projects run by other departments. This won’t come as a surprise to [...]

Read more

A bald dog can teach us new tricks

May 7, 2007

I’ve been tracking down examples for project failure, mainly in the UK, and Tom “Bald Dog” Varjan contacted me with some reasons why he thinks projects are unsuccessful. His points are really interesting, so I thought I’d share them with you. Tom’s business cards introduce him as “Bald Dog, Organisational Provocateur,” so I’m sure that [...]

Read more

More problems in public service projects

May 4, 2007

I’m glad I’m not the project manager tasked with trying to make sense out of the US Transport Security project. Can you imagine? All those different US Government agencies pitching in with their ideas. One of the case studies for my book was about the difficulties two US Government departments had trying to agree how [...]

Read more

Parcels and planes: two case studies

May 3, 2007

The British Computer Society held an event at the end of February that I couldn’t make it to, but they’ve put a summary of the speeches online.  The two case studies presented look really interesting, especially the British Airways one.  It’s always good when people bother to do a write-up of events they have attended.  [...]

Read more

PM Knowledge: tell us what you know!

April 27, 2007

Keith O’Shea, an Australian project manager I met online when I was writing my book, is doing some research into project management knowledge areas for his PhD. The idea is to identify what project managers know, and how frequently they use those areas of knowledge. I’ve read a lot of research about what skills we [...]

Read more

Even the big projects…

February 8, 2007

It’s always reassuring to know that project problems aren’t confined to my world. If your project is at risk of breaching its cost baseline, schedule baseline or both, take comfort in the fact that 16% of the US Government’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s projects are in the same boat.

Read more

Disaster! Milk explosion

January 15, 2007

Unfortunately I’ve spilt a carton of milk into my kitchen drawer (please don’t ask how, I’m not sure I was awake enough to remember), which has hampered my ability to write interestingly this week. So while I go and wash up every piece of cutlery I own, please take a look at the Upwardly Mobile [...]

Read more

New year, new links

January 7, 2007

It’s been a while since I updated the links in the sidebar, so have a look at the great new project management blogs I have included.  Some of which, like Craig’s and Raven’s, have been long overdue in joining the list. I’ve also updated the Useful Resources page, so if you need any inspiration for [...]

Read more

New security magazine launched

December 4, 2006

BCS and the Information Security Specialist Group have launched a new magazine, Information Security Now. The first issue takes a look at enterprise security and includes an interview with Phil Cracknell of Deloitte. You can download a .pdf version of the magazine from their website. John Sherwood’s article on return on investment is particularly relevant [...]

Read more

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →