The Project Coach

The Art of War Room

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

 Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space.  › Continue reading…

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share.  › Continue reading…

In my last article I discussed characteristics and roles of the agile scrum methodology as compared to waterfall.  In this continuation article, I committed to examine the artifacts, meetings and processes involved and also discuss what they compare to in a waterfall context.  By design agile and the scrum methodology deliberately minimize processes, artifacts and meetings › Continue reading…

Since we are on the topic of troubled projects, I started thinking about what has now been branded the Deepwater Horizon Response Project.  This situation has similarities to many project calamities one might encounter in the course of dealing with internal or external customer organizations.  A customer organization messes up, BIG TIME, and you have to step in and turn it around. 

In this case, the project manager is retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is in charge of the federal government’s response to the oil spill resulting from the April 20^th explosion at one of British Petroleum’s (BP) offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.  › Continue reading…

It’s the end of the 2^nd Quarter and the first half of the year, and for many organizations, it’s a time when projects and programs are reviewed and analyzed.  Some will ultimately be nurtured:  more money, resources, attention, whatever the scare resource is.  Other projects and programs will not fare so well and will be terminated outright or “back-burnered” to death. › Continue reading…

We all know that developing the project team is a responsibility of the project manager.  In broad strokes, we know that “developing the project team improves the people skills, technical competencies, and overall team environment and project performance”. (Project Management Book of Knowledge, 4^th Ed., pg 230).  

We know that it’s important to put some effort into the team dynamics.  We plan team building activities, and can find a plethora of ideas on how to use team building events to improve communication, build trust and learn to solve problems and make decisions as a group.  If you have ever been lucky enough to engage is some high quality team-building exercises, you know that they really can provide some value.   And sometimes we hold team-building exercises as a way to reward the team for hard work and a job well done – just a chance to let people who have toiled together, through moments of panic and hours of boredom, kick back and have some fun. 

But in the heat of the battle, it’s easy to forget that the project manager actually has a responsibility to develop the individual project team members.  › Continue reading…

Well, the season has wrapped up, and for project managers, there were plenty of lessons to learn.  We saw failures in communication, planning, execution and risk management.  We saw poor ideas that were well-executed and good ideas that suffered in implementation.  We saw coalitions form and break apart.

Ultimately, it came down to Holly Robinson Peete and Bret Michaels, neither whom I would have predicted would be a finalist.  › Continue reading…

Well, it finally happened.  Cyndi Lauper was finally fired.  She has been a terrible disappointment all season, and it finally caught up with her. 

Cyndi served as project manager twice, losing once and winning once.  In Episode 1, she led the women’s team, Tenacity, in their first loss in the diner challenge.  I had expected her to be a really strong contender, and was very surprised by her miserable performance in that task.  During that episode, she demonstrated that she was not able to manage the work of other people and I blogged about how she never really “got” the point of the challenge, which was to raise money for charity.  She instead focused on running a diner, and did that badly as well.  The men’s team, Rocksolid, focused on raising money and trounced the ladies.  › Continue reading…