Hard work is killing people. Literally!
Burnout is a serious issue for several countries, industries and people, even if we don't acknowledge in as many words. In our industry, where heroism, cowboy programming and all-nighters are considered cool and an integral part of the software subculture, there has been a (really) small effort to address work-life balance....
How do you manage intercultural issues in your teams?
Distributed and virtual teams are a reality of today’s world. It is not just limited to well-heeled MNCs – we see countless everyday examples of such teams with NGOs, startups, voluntary efforts, college project and so on. There is more to working with people from different time zones and cultural contexts than we realize. Problem is, most of us haven’t been exposed to, or adequately trained to handle such diverse teams – not just as a manager but even as a team member. ...
Role of Integrative Thinking in Project Management
The conventional wisdom is to try to find a via media but that is perhaps meekly surrendering to complexity by taking a short-cut to a suboptimal solution. He argues that the some of the most exceptional leaders do not succumb to the obvious “either/or” thinking but rather work patiently towards synthesizing the best from both of these opposing views to create a best-of-breed solution that is far superior to either of these. He calls it “integrative thinking”....
Project Management vs. Program Management
Program Management is often seen as the next logical step for seasoned project managers looking to take on bigger challenges. While project management is more about managing within boundaries of a project and gatekeeping it against anything and everything that threatens the status quo, program management is typically all about breaking those very boundaries and managing across them by taking up anything and everything that threatens the status quo....
Is your project’s team spirit ‘flammable’?
Welcome to the ‘day-mare’ of leading a dysfunctional team with highly ‘flammable’ spirit – nothing is perhaps more detrimental to project success than such team dynamics. Assembling a crack team doesn’t automatically transform into a dream team. ...
Just listen…when you can’t see!
Today I sat through a most amazing speech by a celebrated toastmaster. He has a very subtle sense of humor, a great command over his diction, confident body language, uses really simple vocabulary in a beautiful manner and establishes wonderful rapport with the audience. Did I tell he was blind?...
Project Manager and The Three Questions
He was newly appointed as the Project Manager for a moderately complex project. Prior to this assignment, he was trained in the best of methods and had access to the latest of tools. And yet, he was struggling. He was struggling to get the right answers to the three most basic questions: What is the right time to do begin each activity? Who are the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid? What is the most important thing to do? Like this:Like Loading......
Is Planning an old idea whose time is up?
In the age of nano attention-spans of people, the tendency and respect for planning things upfront has taken a serious beating. The mainstream logic is to simply “play by the ear” because there are far too many moving parts to be completely accounted for and properly factored-in - and in any case, by the time the plan goes to execution, ground realities would have changed beyond recognition, thereby rendering the plan completely useless by that time. In software development, an inaccurate predictive long-range model such as Waterfall has been replaced by more accurate adaptive short-range Agile methods that solve the line-of-sight problem but don’t address the original problem - that of planning a large project with its own share of uncertainties. While none of those arguments might be wrong par se, we conveniently ignore the fact that that is the nature...
How do you schedule tasks in a project?
How do you decide what tasks to schedule first: the complex ones or the easy ones? the short ones or the long ones? the risky ones or the sure-shot ones? Most often, this task sequence is determined by hard logic, soft logic, or some other external constraints. However, how do you decide when there are no such contraints? If we look at the risk driving the project lifecycle and scheduling, then it is natural to expect high-risk tasks being tackled at the start just so that we are systematically driving down risks in the project and achieve higher certainty levels as we get close to the project. However, it seems inconceivable that someone will cherry-pick the easy tasks first and leave all high-risk ones for the end! Clearly, that is setting up the project for a grand finale of...
Your estimates or mine ?
For decades now, the project management world is divided between top-down estimation and bottom-up estimation. While a top-down approach might have limitations, it perhaps is the only way to get some meaningful estimates at the start of a project. A bottom-up approach might be a great way to get more accurate and reliable estimates but you might have to wait for a problem to be whittled down to that small a level to get such reliable estimates. Both are required for a comprehensive and useful project planning, but unfortunately, most people see one over other, and the Agilists abandoning top-down in favor of the highly accurate but low-lookahead bottom-up methods. A top-down estimation is a great way to abstract the problem without worrying about its nitty-gritties, and come up with a workable estimates when there is no other source of getting...