There’s an old “Doonesbury” comic strip in which it’s Christmas and Duke, who is theU.S. ambassador to China, is at his desk opening gifts. One of them turns out to be a pistol—maybe an WWII-vintage Luger. As he’s checking it out, looking through the sites, working the action,...
What sort of personality is best for project management? Insane? Well, insanity is more a pathology than a personality type, so let’s set that aside and consider an article I ran across a while back at http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/profiles/intro.htm. It’s a well-reasoned piece and I recommend it as...
I’m still on my personality-type kick, but don’t fret—I think this will be the last post on the topic for a while. You may recall that in our last exciting episode there were several personality types labeled in the Max Wideman article (http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/profiles/intro.htm) as not so hot for project management....
Early on in this blog adventure, I mentioned I was building my son atreehouse. Well, I’m still at it and it has gone from a couple of 2 x 6’s bolted to a tree to a partially-finished structure with a floor, trap door, and some...
All the gurus say communication is 90% of the project manager’s job. Thanks, gurus. That leaves us10% for everything else, including lunch. So what’s a PM to do? Skip lunch? Never! Surely “everything else” takes up more than 10%. Just look at what we do all day: Get people together for meetings...
Writers and artists know the moment of ignorance well. It’s that period of time you spend staring at the blank paper or canvas, knowing there’s work at hand, but having no idea how to begin. A strong urge to lay down the pen or brush and walk away...
In large part, it’s the project or product manager’s mind and heartin which products and services are grown to maturity. Nowhere else does every single element needed to produce the end result come together. It’s as if our mind/heart, or brains/guts if you like, is a...
Ah, summertime. The bees are buzzin’, the lightning bugs are lightin’ and the mosquitos are bitin’. Warm temperatures and high humidity (at least around these parts) engender a torpor that seeps into your bones and makes you wonder, “why work?” Naturally, if you rouse yourself from...
From time to time, especially when things are sliding down the proverbial tubes, you’ve no doubt asked yourself why you ever became a project manager. My guesses as to why you might have entered the profession: You stumbled into project management. You pursued project management on purpose, because you thought it was...
Right now, the project I’m really worried about is my eight-year-old son’s Pinewood Derby car. (For the uninformed, the Pinewood Derby is an annual event in which Cub Scouts pit miniature, wooden, gravity-driven race cars against one another.) He’s got time to work on it,...