Tag: project management
Innovation from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Last Wednesday, I had lunch with Delphine Khanna, Digital Projects Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Information Technology & Digital Development (ITaDD) Department. Delphine filled me in on an innovative approach her library is using to involve library […]
Envisioning Successful Outcomes
How often have you been handed an assignment and plunged into it, then realized that you have an incomplete idea of what the end product is supposed to be? Have you struggled to finish something only to find yourself in an endless “re-do” loop? […]
Risk Assessment Revisited
The experience of putting together the project management “shot-in-the-arm” I described a couple of posts back gave me a new perspective on risk assessment. I’ve been an advocate of a much fuller brainstorming session than I described to the transformation […]
Looking anew at Service Level Agreements
“Service Level Agreements”–does the phrase bore you or bring you to tears? Make you run looking for a task designee? You are probably in good company. I suspect there are lots of Service Level Agreement (SLA) templates available online for […]
Project management and transformational change
Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in a day-long workshop to orient 3 new task force teams. In this context, a “task force team” is a 6-7 person team of experts drawn from different University of California (UC) campuses and […]
Strategic travel
Has your travel budget been getting you down? Or should I say, has the absence of a travel budget been getting you down? I’ve written here about what it takes to work remotely, and I’ve been thinking lately about how to […]
Project ecology
It’s standard to describe software development and implementation projects as having “life cycles.” If you look at some of the cool new agile tools, you’ll see another paradigm: story-telling, in which a project becomes a narrative, and each task is […]
Train train train…
I’ve heard quite a few project managers say lately, “I don’t have any formal project management training,” as if to discount whatever observation they were about to make, because it was “only” based on years of experience. A mix of […]
Getting things down: the case for documentation
Half way down the Agile Manifesto (a list of the principles fundamental to agile software development), it states “Working software over comprehensive documentation.” I don’t know how many of us actually refer to the Agile Manifesto when we first get up […]
Start from the ground up
Have you ever been asked “how long does the task list need to be?” If so, has this struck you as code for something else? When I’ve been asked this question, I’ve sometimes thought it was genuine, but just as […]