Agile techniques can also help government teams in short term crisis situations. Here’s the second example I gave. Tim Nolan is a senior applications manager for Collin County in Texas. “[His] job was in jeopardy. A project had fallen off of his radar, and one day, the elected official who had asked for it called, […]
Category Archives: Projects
Agile in government
I work with several government agencies. Recently I was discussing Agile techniques with a group of government project managers. One person said that he’d heard that Agile does not work well in a government environment. Could I describe situations where it was successful? Here is an example of how a formal Agile framework helped a […]
How good is good enough?
Occasionally I speak to a master’s class working towards a Master of Science in Global Leadership degree. Recently I was asked to comment on a student’s analysis of his organization’s project management maturity. That got me curious about the global distribution of maturity levels, so I went to my reference shelf to check one of […]
Make your sausage behind closed doors
You may enjoy eating sausage, but probably less so after you watch the messy process of making it. Similarly, the week to week progress of even successful projects is filled with messy ups, downs, and course corrections. Most high-level stakeholders don’t need to see this normal noise. The project team should take care to not […]
Uninformed sponsors
“Uninformed sponsors – sponsors in name only – are of little help to project managers when obstacles arise.” So says Eric Verzuh, one of my favorite authors on projects. Verzuh continues by citing a study performed within a Fortune 500 corporation. “This study determined that having a known and active sponsor was the number one […]
Plan (enough). Flex (a lot).
Projects are in the middle of constant change. Without some degree of planning, they will get swallowed up in the resulting tumult. However, being able to flex and adapt to changes is equally key. A successful project organization must be good at both planning and flexing, and it must be skilled at varying the balance […]
Be a pragmatist rather than a purist
Be a pragmatist rather than a purist when it comes to management methodologies and frameworks. Such things are means to an end, not ends in themselves. I’ll happily mix and match bits and pieces from different approaches, such as PMBOK and agile, as long as they are effective for the situation I’m in. That’s why […]