Posts under ‘Management’

I’ve just finished reading a book about the Apollo missions that put man on the moon (Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox). The Apollo project was initiated by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he announced to the US Congress his believe that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, […]

In the Project Management world, it’s a refrain that is repeated in almost every training program offered around the world; communicate, communicate, communicate. Despite the fact that students of Project Management are told that as much as 80% of a Project Manager’s time is spent communicating, in most Project Management training courses, as little as […]

In last week’s post we discussed “Social Learning” and the use of role models as a learning tool. Another excellent way for organizations to speed up the educational process lies in creating “reference samples”. Reference samples are examples of key deliverables that demonstrate what high quality deliverables should look like. Much like a picture says […]

Being something of a Systems Thinker, I often find myself reflecting on events to see if I can understand the cause and effect relationships that drive the outcomes we attain. Working in the field of education, that interest has caused me to look deeply into the way individuals learn and how different modes of teaching […]

In theory projects are initiated by the creation and formal approval of a Project Charter. The Charter details the projects objectives, outlines the scope of the project and establishes the authority for the Project Manager to proceed. In practice few of the organizations I visit use a formal Project Charter and instead a hotchpotch of […]

One of the pillars of successful Project Management is the need for a project to have a clearly defined goal. Establishing a goal provides a basis for the project’s scope to be established, provides a way to measure success and provides a reference point for use when making project related decisions. There’s no doubt that […]

One of the fundamentals taught in Project Management class is the need to define what the success of the project will look like. Only by establishing a picture of the desired end state are we able to establish project scope properly and make effective decisions about how to manage the project. In Project Management class […]

Most people who have been through basic management or quality management training will have been exposed to the work of Edwards Deming. Known particularly for his work in helping Japanese companies establish a quality culture, Deming is regarded as a founding father of the quality movement. Although Deming is best known for his use of […]

As many readers will know, the idea of “continual process improvement” is a pillar of the quality management movement. By improving processes, the root cause of problems that allow mistakes to be made can be eliminated, thereby allowing the organization to produce higher quality goods and services. Although the idea of continual improvement started in […]

Although home renovation projects and IT projects may not appear to have much in common, there is one regard in which they are striking similar, both suffer from undesirably high failure rates. In Canada, TV personality and master contractor Mike Holmes draws attention to failed home renovations projects in his show “Holmes on Homes”. Each […]