The Project Coach

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…

So the project is finally finished, the customer has accepted the deliverables, and the documentation has been finished up and handed off.  Ready to go off to the next big adventure?  Not so fast.  Before you disband the team, and lose all that knowledge they have about the last so many months you’ve all toiled together, be sure to hold a lessons learned session.  A Lessons learned session, or post mortem, as it is sometimes called, is typically held › Continue reading…

This week’s episode of Celebrity Apprentice offered a lesson for project managers the world over about recognizing the power of mixing up stagnant teams. 

The guys had been doing pretty well as a team and had learned to play to each other’s strengths after the first six episodes.  The women, not so much.  Cyndi’s initial flakiness has progressed to outright boorishness.  Holly continues to grate with her sledgehammer finesse.  Maria takes things too personally and Summer is the classic peacekeeper.  Sharon has been absent for the last few shows (tolerated because she is The Donald’s pet this season) so her brusqueness has been in short supply but still evident enough to ruffle a few feathers.   › Continue reading…

Sunday, March 14^th marks the premier of the third season of Celebrity Apprentice on NBC at 8:00 PM CST.  The only show on television, scripted or unscripted, about the discipline of project management, it is fascinating for those of us who toil in the trenches of the triple constraint.  The celebrity quotient just makes it that much more addictive. 

Because the show offers so many real-life lessons for project managers (despite the fact that the tasks are being carried out by decidedly surreal celebrity PMs), Cindy and I have decided to analyze each episode in our blog for the next several weeks.  We will also be Twittering during the show each Sunday night.  Join us on Twitter by searching for #celebrityPM if you’d like to chat with us about the drama as it unfolds! Then, each Wednesday, we’ll post a recap of the episode and blog about the lessons we can learn from the show.    › 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 our previous installment of this series, ‘Plan your communications with your “wins” in mind’,  we talked about how to plan and set up vehicles for heralding successes or “wins” as they occur on our project as we do our communications planning.  In this final article we’ll now discuss opportunities to be mindful of as your project progresses so that you have great material to feed into these PR machines you have set up. › Continue reading…