The Project Coach

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…

Let’s start with a definition of social media.  According to Wikipedia  (and that’s an obvious place to go for information about this topic) “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues.” The last part of that explanation is really powerful for project managers, as we strive to turn monologues into dialogues.  › Continue reading…

This week’s Celebrity Apprentice was an object lesson for just how badly people can handle conflict.  Women are particularly guilty of avoiding conflict so they won’t have to hurt anyone’s feelings. 

Cyndi Lauper has consistently been a distraction to her team in the first three episodes of Celebrity Apprentice.  Several of her team members on Tenacity, the women’s team, have whined about her in their camera confessionals.  › Continue reading…

In my last article on estimation, I talked about creating consistent estimates by establishing a scale, where for every type of work you do, and for a range of complexity levels (i.e. low – medium – high), you record pre-set values that can be plugged in to your estimates.  What I was in fact describing was a complexity model.  In this article I will describe how as a team you can build your own complexity model for your development organization to govern your estimates. › Continue reading…

Do you understand the difference between consensus and compromise?  The words sound alike but the distinction is important. 

I recently attended a conflict resolution class lead by Judy Mares-Dixon, a well known mediator and designer of dispute resolution systems for organizations around the world.  Our class spent a lot of time discussing compromise versus consensus.  › Continue reading…