I see altitude as scale and scope. I > my immediate environment > my family and/or department > the organization > the neighborhood and/or market > the nation > the earth > the universe > ? We only have control of the I (and some days, for some of us, even THAT is dodgy). We […]
Thinking by Levels
The discipline of project and program management contains a helpful framework for thinking about the levels within which we function. Project – An activity with a beginning, middle, and end that we pursue in order to create change. In a personal context, this could be writing a book, following the initiation phase of a diet, […]
How to Recover from a Poor Start
Heather, my dog Cally, and I stood in the woods. We were 30 minutes into our first Orienteering event and still hadn’t found the first checkpoint. We made the faulty assumption that the trails would be well marked and that we could just follow the trail to the first checkpoint. Because of that assumption, we […]
Change Planning As a Project Decision Tool
Classical project planning goes through initiation, planning, execution and closure cycles. Agile projects follow a similar model, just with faster and more frequent cycles between planning and execution. Typically – Change Management activities occur sometime during execution when the project team realizes that they need to implement their project to others. Most of us have […]
Teams as its own Process Area
Team Management, in Version 6 of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOKv6), is buried in the Project Resource Management Knowledge Area under the Executing Process Group. PMBOKv6 is 756 dense pages (not including the Agile Practice Guide). Of those pages, only 45 of them mention teams. Only 25 of those pages talk about teams […]
Lakota Sioux Buffalo Hunting: A Case Study in the Importance of Roles
Pictures from my trip to the Badlands National Park, South Dakota. The Plains Indian buffalo hunts provide an excellent example of clear scope, clear “why,” defined roles, and matching roles with skills. The scope of the Buffalo hunt – to get at least enough buffalo so that they could feed the tribe and provide raw materials […]
Video: An Example of Experiential Intent
(Transcript – edited to remove some of the verbal tics) I wanted to talk a little further about this notion of experiential intent. As I look at this experience and the decision making that went into my trip, you know, I had mentioned before that I did time calculations I could have gone to the […]
Video: Experience DURING Projects
(Transcript – minus the “so….” ) There’s another consideration when planning projects that I think gets neglected quite a bit and that’s the question of what experience do you want to have during the project? We get fixated on the destination, what will get fixed, and on why we want to do what we want […]
Video: Niagara Falls and Waterfall Projects
You may have noticed that I’ve been traveling over the past few months. I wanted to use these trips as an opportunity to experiment with different content formats and tools. Let me know what you think. Thanks. (Transcript – via Temi (not an affiliate link). Where Wendy learns she says “so” a lot.) Greetings from […]
The Importance of Rest Stops in Projects
I work to design “rest stops” in my projects. These rest stops aren’t necessarily milestones (though milestones make good rest stops). Rest stops are places within the execution of the project where the team can take a breather and evaluate what they need. Do they have the resources to continue? What changes have occurred in […]
