All in project management
Joe Dager's Business901 podcast this week has an interesting interview on Creating Flow with Don Reinertsen. While I enjoyed the entire podcast, the thing that piqued my interest in particular was around using these ideas in managing flow. Real execution advice.
I have said this before: many organizations have far more good ideas than they have the resources to execute those ideas. I was listening to a recent Harvard Business IdeaCast and my ears perked up when they started talking about multitasking.
Pointers to a couple case studies on process improvement from MIT and focusing on a division of Ford Motor Complany.
I've been enjoying Glen Alleman's rants about the proponents of "project management 2.0." This time he makes some interesting observations about the role of people talking to each other vs. doing status updates.
Visible buffers give management a way to manage the system. And they also give the project participants a way to guage
In the middle of the behind the scenes video on how they built the Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video, Adam Sadowsky repeats the words in the title of this piece.
Glen Alleman has some interesting thoughts about uncertainty in projects and whether we need to estimate better. I wonder if theory of constraints and buffer management points to a different solution.
How Smart Leaders Talk About Time is a "Conversation Starter" from HarvardBusiness.org in October. It talks about the the struggle so many businesses have of having too many things to do and prioritizing amongst them. What is a leader to do?
How in the world do you get MS Project to show you the calendar-day duration of a task when the "working calendar" of the project is a 5-day work week (or a two-shift, 5-day week; or a three-shift, 7-day week)?
There are always more good ideas than we have resources to execute those ideas. Dennis Stevens has a look at this from the Agile perspective that inspires my thoughts here.
In case you think I am a dyed-in-the-wool Theory of Constraints promoter, I point to this article by Dan Trietsch from a 2005 issue of Project Management Journal.
Phillip G. Armour discusses is the nature of people in groups. There are people (often leaders of some sort) whose behavior sets the tone for the whole group.
Dennis Stevens has a nice description of how Theory of Constraints and Big Agile relate to each other. I've known that the do, but I hadn't given much thought to the connections.
Patrick Lencioni was the keynote speaker today at the Project Flow conference. He did a great job of speaking on the topic of "Building a Culture of Teamwork and Engagement" with a focus on telling hilarious stories about business and himself. I suspect you could pick up a lot of the below from reading his books, but here is a summary of the 90 minutes he spent with us today.
The fundamentals of CCPM workshop was interesting in that I saw some new simulations (games) and he put the vicious cycle of standard operations in a drawing that made a lot of sense to me.