Asides
The changing face of the U.S. job market
Is the U.S. experiencing a jobless recovery, or facing something much more fundamental? Is the changing economic landscape and emerging global economy causing a structural shift in the very nature of our workforce? The influence of the global economy is undeniably bringing about changes that are both new and unanticipated. As information flows around the [...]
“The key to a successful project is in the planning,” or is it?
Is the key to a successful project in the planning, as the axiom goes… or have we already been lost in the trees? My problem with this is that it’s a very narrow, incomplete answer to a much larger scope problem. Creating the project plan is important, but it’s not “the” key to project success [...]
The obituary exercise
Get your team to write an obituary for your project — before you start the project. Make it part of your risk planning exercise. This exercise is related to the Merlin backward planning exercise and is also used in the Toyota Production System. Toyota used the obituary approach when creating their “Toyota University” program and engaged [...]
When there’s a freeloader on your team
According to extensive research The Gallup Organization (Washington D.C.) and Harvard Business Review have conducted over the past decade, few factors are as corrosive to employee engagement as a colleague who skates through the workweek taking advantage of the much harder work of others. What’s the cost of disengagement? Much more than any manager wants [...]
Be human on your “about page”
Seth Godin offers some good advice regarding your company image: “When someone comes to your site for the first time, they’re likely to hit ‘about’ or ‘bio’. Why? Because they want a human, a story and reassurance.” Don’t use meaningless jargon, talk like a normal person, and if you put up a picture don’t use [...]
It’s never a good time for training
As Jamin Arvig, President of WaterFilters.net learned the hard way, putting off training has a cost of its own: Lost employees. As Jarmin wrote in his A Worker Quit — Because I Didn’t Train Him To Succeed, if you don’t arm your employees to succeed they’ll eventually go elsewhere to look for career advancement. “[It] [...]
Training is number one
As I’ve pointed out more than once, training your employees is one of the best things you can do to benefit your business and your team. Even so, fears about what happens if you train your staff and they leave to find a better job are prevalent — but consider the alternative: What happens if [...]
First, care. Care intensely.
Excellent advice found on 43 folders: Before you sweat the logistics of focus: first, care. Care intensely. We spend a great deal of time working on “engaging the team” or engaging ourselves when what we really need to do is find the willpower to focus on the foremost problem at hand. As Merlin points out, [...]
Hiring for the culture
Hiring the right people means more than identifying good technical skills. A person’s resume can be outstanding, but it won’t matter one whit if personalities clash or new hires just don’t mesh with your culture. As Dan McCarthy writes in How to Hire for Cultural Fit, “It’s not what you know, but how you fit [...]
Whiteboard as a PM tool
Sometimes we forget that some of the best tools are the simplest ones. If you had to pick just one tool for project management what would it be? I think in my case a whiteboard comes out pretty near the top, if not the top. My point is, focus on the work at hand, not [...]
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