The Project Coach

Well, I am late posting this blog because I couldn’t decide what to write about!  You know what I am talking about – analysis paralysis, the bane of all project managers. › 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…

The premier of the third season of Celebrity Apprentice certainly provided lots of grist for the gristmill and the portent of intriguing things to come. 

Several themes emerged during the first episode, which had the teams (divided by gender) run a New York diner for a few hours: 

• Cindi Lauper was an ineffective leader for the women’s team and Holly Robinson Peete demonstrated the concept of “emergent leadership” in the vacuum left in Lauper’s wake. 
• Bret Michaels, › 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…

In my last article, “Is it bigger than a breadbox”, I talked about the three points in a project when estimates are usually delivered.  The topic of that article was the rough order of magnitude (or ROM) estimates generally given during the project selection process or at project initiation.  Those estimates can have +- 50% margin of error in them due to lack of information.  Once the project is approved, the team begins working on scope definition artifacts, developing first a high level, then a detailed scope statement, and a work breakdown structure to establish a scope baseline.  What I want to discuss in this article is a method to derive a planning estimate at a point where the high level scope statement is created, but before the detailed scope definition or WBS artifacts are finalized. › Continue reading…