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 Max Walker -- Exploring project management in small or informal project environments. About Cottage PM About Max |
One of my avocations is directing choirs. I’m currently preparing an Easter-time performance of Rutter’s Requiem with a small choir of about 20. (Not nearly enough voices, but that’s not relevant to this writing.) My choirs are generally smaller than I’d like. Mostly because I won’t beg grown-up people to sing. As a PM, you’d think [...] It’s often touted as a weakness and a risk, and I agree that it can be so, but I argue that in our Cottage PM environments, the “working PM” has a distinct advantage. The “Working PM” is the project manager who not only owns project management tasks on the project, but also owns other project deliverables. [...] You’ll enjoy this blog entry from Project Connections: http://blog.projectconnections.com/project_practitioners/2010/01/managing-the-common-coldas-a-project.html The author, Margaret de Haan, suffering from a severe head cold, writes out a project plan, complete with tasks (coughing, sneezing, TV watching, sleeping, taking, meds, etc.), schedule, Budget ($94 cold!!), Risks (flu instead of cold) with associated costs (more doctor visits and meds), etc. It’s good laugh, but [...] There’s been an interesting debate in the PM space for a little while. As Agile development practices continue to expand, there’s a natural tension as both the PM camp and the Agile camp try to figure out how mesh their methodologies. The debate centers around core differences in the traditional PM approaches and the new [...] I read an interesting tidbit recently: “Parsing” by Clay Johnson (@cjoh), included in Seth Godin’s eBook: What Matters Now. Here’s an excerpt of the tidbit: How many times have you paid your taxes? Ever get a receipt back telling you what you bought? You’re paying for something, right? Why is everybody arguing about taxes and deficits [...] OK, that title sounds more noble than I’ll be writing. See, I just caught a flu bug. Not very severe, and hopefully it won’t become severe. But it’s been flirting with me for 4 days now, and the fever finally began today, just when I thought I was getting better. But this post isn’t about [...] I have hanging outside my office the overview poster that came with my PMBOK4. The poster shows a rough flow chart of all the PMBOK’s project management processes. It also shows the macro-flow between Planning, Monitoring & Controlling, and Executing. A decent flow chart. Wish I could find a soft copy of it. One of our [...] I spent Friday morning in the first of several one-on-one meetings with staff finalizing objectives for the fiscal year. That’s got to be the best part of managing! Last quarter, one of my teams had an important project to deliver by Q-end. It seemed impossible. We were half-way through our Fundamentals of Project Management book club [...] I got the first issue of my renewed subscription to Inc. Magazine this week (November 2009, see inc.com). One of the first articles I read had a good Cottage PM scenario as the opening story. The article is “Slow Growth = Slow Death?” and is mostly about growth questions and strategies. It’s an insightful read [...] In December, Pawel Brodzinsk post the following article on his blog, Failed Projects: You Can Do Worse. In that article, he puts a really good list of contributors to project failure. While Pawel writes from a formal project environment, I find his list of contributors project failure relevant to informal PM environments — Cottage PM. Here’s [...] |
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