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As a Project Manager would you rather your team be more innovative or more productive?

Yahoo! remote employee contemplating his future Marissa Mayer , the new head of Yahoo! , has just caused a major brouhaha by abolishing the company’s work-at-home policy and ordering everyone to work in the office. Why? Because she believes that working face-to-face fosters a more collaborative culture for the simple, yet powerful reason, that people simply talk to one another more. And when they do get back to work, they’ll work in an office environment physically configured (lots of open spaces, no private offices or cubes, etc. ) to promote dialogue, not just among those who work together on teams, but with as many people as possible. All for the objective of encouraging better communication and having impromptu, serendipitous chance encounters with colleagues that may yield greater innovation. She is doing this at a time when many other companies are headed in exactly the opposite direction. Read More »

As a Project Manager would you rather your team be more innovative or more productive? Marissa Mayer has definite ideas

Yahoo! remote employee contemplating his future Marissa Mayer , the new head of Yahoo! , has just caused a major brouhaha by abolishing the company’s work-at-home policy and ordering everyone to work in the office. Why? Because she believes that working face-to-face fosters a more collaborative culture for the simple, yet powerful reason, that people simply talk to one another more. And when they do get back to work, they’ll work in an office environment physically configured (lots of open spaces, no private offices or cubes, etc. ) to promote dialogue, not just among those who work together on teams, but with as many people as possible. All for the objective of encouraging better communication and having impromptu, serendipitous chance encounters with colleagues that may yield greater innovation. Read More »

Three tips for dealing with “cotton mouth” when presenting to key stakeholders

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech on February 18. As he progressed in his speech it’s clear the nerves kicked in sucking all the moisture out his mouth giving him the dreaded “cotton mouth,” or dry mouth as medical professionals call it. In fact, it was so bad, he wiped his mouth and slurred his words, and then basically lunged for a bottle of water to lubricate his jaw. He was laughed at all over the Internet. Watch this YouTube video and you’ll see exactly what the poor guy was going through.   I’m not making fun of Rubio, although I certainly chuckled when watching him because I know exactly what that’s like. Read More »

How to handle “Unk Unks” in Agile

Unk Unks ? Yes, unknown, unknowns. They are a category of risk that I define in my Dictionary of Project Management Terms as “risks that are not foreseen and therefore have not been planned for during the risk management process.”   This is language that comes to us from the risk management practices at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), but that has found its way in the vernacular of risk management practitioners around the world and in every industry. Former DOD Secretary Rumsfeld discussing Unk Unks. For those who know risk management it made perfect sense. For those who didn’t it was gibberish! While incremental and iterative development is designed in many ways to remove uncertainty from our projects, it certainly doesn’t, nor can it, eliminate uncertainty. Read More »

Imagine a world with no project managers: it’s happening in Scrum right now

Last summer I decided to learn more about what being a ScrumMaster was all about because at ESI we were in the process of launching a full 8 course  Agile Practitioner Program .  So, I enrolled in a Certified Scrum Master course. In a credentialed crazed world I thought I could kill two birds with one stone: learn about Scrum and pick up the CSM credential from the Scrum Alliance . And, that’s exactly what I did. Even though easy to earn, I did learn quite a bit It wasn’t hard. In fact it was surprisingly easy. Sit in a class for two days and take a test Read More »