Skip to main content

Posts

What is a Team?

The concept of a team can be highly demonstrated and understood through watching a music band, where each team member is responsible for his instrument, and all band members are responsible for the whole piece of music. For an unforgettable symphony, there should be no dissonant sounds; all instruments should be played in harmony and in synch, each in his turn. Guitar, drums and other instruments are each needed to serve a certain purpose, no instrument is more important than the other. It’s the same in software, whether you are part of a small project team or part of a big project team, or even part of your organization as a whole, the concept of a team is still applicable. Team members should always focus on completing each other not on blaming each other or getting rid of responsibility or throwing their tasks to others. Teamwork is harmony in everything, each team member knows his role and the role of others, each plays really good with his tools and experience. It’s like
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Project Managers' Sizes!

At first, a PM to me meant a respectful person, full of experience and knowledge, some kind of a Chinese monk, sober, who knows what s/he does and knows that his/her job is to deliver successful projects as much as to help people and guide them. To my surprise “as usual”, I found out that there are different types of PMs in the world… In other words, different sizes of PMs! Let me introduce to you two project managers’ sizes and my stories with them. Mini PM referred to as Miss Mini and Mighty PM referred to as Mr. Mighty… Mini PM When I first met her, I tried to convince myself that she definitely looks much younger then her real age. Anyways… for her, a planning activity was equivalent to and maybe easier than preparing for a picnic or a weekend trip with friends and family! She was assigned a very big strategic project, and her role was to create the high level project plan for all teams and to coordinate with them to deliver the big project on time "of course".
Post a Comment
Read more

RPM Technique

I once used a very weird technique with my team to get things done in a short duration in a project that was very far away from being on schedule… For a while I’ve been asking my team for their progress, following up heavily and on daily basis, staying late with them in the office and sometimes staying till the next morning (online from home), trying to dig deeper by developing and testing with them…. And still we were very late in achieving any of our internal milestones… By time, I was empathizing them and I was trying my best to reduce the effect of the pressure under which they were put for a long time. We started a weekly game competition with some funny yet work-related rules, amongst which was “ each member in a sub-team should finish his work before the day of the competition ”… it went fine for about 3 weeks, then the situation became worse… and we all stopped participating in the competition… I then tried another technique… I started buying them either lunch or dinner in
4 comments
Read more

To PMP or not to PMP?!

That is the question! As implied by its name PMP (Project Management Professional), to obtain such a certificate you should be a professional in the field of Project Management… To my surprise, almost 95% of the people I met holding this certificate know nothing about Project Management!! They think that studying for this certificate and obtaining it means they are professional, although they should be professional to deserve such a certificate. I understand that one of the prerequisites to get this certificate is to have some practical experience in the Project Management field. But for some odd reason, I discovered that the people I am talking about, which are a majority in the field now, don’t really have experience, some of them are even fresh graduates… I once had a very aggressive argument with a “ kid ” in my team, and by the word “ kid ” I am referring to his age and his attitude in despising my knowledge and experience due to his ignorance, he was very aggressive and arrogant
2 comments
Read more

The Triangle of Tactics

Sometimes referred to as the Triangle of Horror… where the PM tries his best to maintain his balance while walking on the very thin project rope between this triangle and the Project Constraints Triangle (time, cost & scope). The triangle sides represent: The Team, The Client and The Management Every side of this triangle is obsessed by the sole idea that the other two sides want him dead, i.e. the team thinks that the client and the top management want him dead and vice versa. Usually a good PM gets lost while trying to maintain this triangle in good shape to keep all parties satisfied and happy while making them think they are his first and only priority to get out what is needed from them for the sake of the project. From my perspective, this is a much harder balance to keep rather than maintaining and managing the Project Constraints Triangle… It highly depends on people, their culture, maturity level, and on the PM’s ability to understand this and deal with it in a
4 comments
Read more

The Bus Driver

They took some time to plan for the trip… They drew the road map, bought some food and beverages… and got equipped with the necessary tools… They were going to travel through the woods to draw the magnificent scenes which were observed by their neighbors early this year… This wasn’t their first trip together as a team, though they were all excited… The bus driver was in charge for making the big decision in the trip while taking care of the travellers’ team while of course driving the bus and communicating daily with his supervisor in the station. The map was clear, the weather was very well studied, though the bus driver expected to pass by some pitfalls in the road as there were some reparation in the way. He reported this to his supervisor and requested to take some more supplies just in case they have to camp one or two days more, but the supervisor refused “ the trip has to be completed on time and the painting should be ready for sale by the end of the week ” Anyways,
2 comments
Read more

The Triangle is missing The Circle

By experience -the bad one of course- I discovered that the famous Project Management triangle is missing a very important containing circle… The Strategy Circle . The Strategy Circle is my simple explanation for many of the catastrophic situations projects end up with. I totally believe that this should not happen and that Strategy exists to set goals and directions for the benefit of organizations and accordingly for the benefit of projects and teams. Unfortunately, I witnessed many cases where it was exactly the opposite. I was an eye witness of the failure of many projects and sometimes companies because of misunderstanding the meaning of Strategy and how to use it to bring companies to success. Some companies bankrupted because of this! De-formation Effect The Strategy Circle is sometimes surrounding the Project Management triangle and thus imposing pressure on it and suppressing it and some other times it is pushing on the triangle from the inside and thus inflatin
Post a Comment
Read more