Pat meets me in the lobby and walks me to the conference room for our 9 a.m. meeting. She yawns several times during our two-minute walk. She yawns a few more times before everyone else arrives. “Late night?” I ask. “They’re all late,” she replies. “I’m way overworked.” When I asked why, she says, “I’m […]
With effective project portfolio management, everyone knows which project is #1, which is #2, which is #3, and so on down the line. Then you commit to those projects in order, by making sure they have teams who can do the work required, that the projects have any other resources they need until you reevaluate
For years, many project and functional managers have believed they need the “exact right person” in each role on a project. Those exact right people are specialists, and some of them have quite narrow specialties. Here’s the story of one specialist and her impact on several projects. Two project managers needed the same person, a
We are living in a time of economic uncertainty. Fine. For some people, that might mean a hunker-down, reduce-risk, stick with what we know mentality. I take a contrarian’s approach: Start the risky projects. If we don’t start the risky projects, how can we discover a breakthrough, reduce waste, or innovate enough to work our
Summary: Long-time advocate of status reports, Johanna Rothman has come across a new way of reporting the movement of a project using something we experience every day—the weather. In this week’s column, she sheds a little sunshine on this new technique, which demonstrates the status of a project a lot like meteorologists announce current weather
Summary: Drawing up a to-do list sounds like a logical starting point when you want to prioritize your workload. But if you have an extra-long list of tasks, the list you should start with is the not-to-do list. Doing so forces you to take an extra hard look at what you’re doing and if you should
Summary: Knowing how much work your group can accomplish–and how much it takes to complete that work–is critical to your success as a manager. In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman explains how to ascertain your team’s potential and how to use that information to define and manage your project portfolio so it doesn’t manage you. I
Part of my consulting practice is to perform assessments. Sometimes, those assessments discover misalignments between IT and the business. Misalignments show up as “problem” projects, “inadequate” testing, and other typical problems in IT. It turns out, though, that many IT misalignment problems can be solved by small changes in IT work processes. With 10 years
Now that I’ve piqued your curiosity about using writing and speaking to recruit in part 1, let’s discuss the details of who speaks and writes, where to speak and write, and when. Who should speak and write? The best people to speak and write are your hiring managers. I realize that this statement puts you
You’ve got a ton of projects. You can’t do them all at once because you don’t have the people to do them. You know better than to ask people to multitask on more than one project—no one will get anything done. One tactic is to organize the projects into a portfolio and rank them by