Posts under ‘People’

Through our International Project Leadership Academy (IPLA) division, Calleam is proud to offer our class dedicated to the needs of Project Sponsors. Course Outline Format : 1 day in class session The role of the Project Sponsor is among the toughest roles in today’s business world. It’s the pivotal role that sets direction, makes key strategic decisions and […]

Project Management is a field that has experienced rapid growth in recent years.  Although the origins of Project Management lie in the field of construction, the value of Project Management is now being recognized by organizations throughout the economy. Recent data attained from a major Canada wide job posting website demonstrates that growth and shows […]

Implementing a process improvement initiative within an organization is an activity fraught with difficulty. On paper it sounds easy. Define the new process, document it, publish it, do some training and voila. In practice, most organizations struggle with the “voila” stage. Of course the problem comes down to culture change. Culture change is the dark […]

We human beings can be clever souls and there’s no end to the number of ways we find to avoid addressing problems. In last week’s post I talked about “externalization” and how people use “externalisation” as a mechanism to avoid blame. While avoiding blame is important to some people I think part of the reason […]

Much like the famous twelve step program used for dealing with substance abuse, a first step in addressing the issues that lead to project failure is a willingness to admit that a problem exists. Facing up to a mistake or being willing to take ownership for events that we feel reflect poorly upon us, is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Hiring is one of the most important processes in an organization, but sadly it seldom gets much attention. Interviews are often rushed and in many cases interviewers allow candidates to simply regurgitate their resume. Given the huge variation in individual capabilities (in software development, studies repeatedly show a 10 to 1 variance) short changing the […]

At the recent Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Lisamarie Babik of Menlo Innovations gave an excellent talk entitled “Beginners Mind”. For those not familiar with the expression, the term refers to the open and receptive state of mind that we have when we’re beginners at something. The concept is based on […]