Payson Hall is a consulting project manager for Catalysis Group, Inc. in Sacramento, California. Payson consults on project management issues and teaches project management. Email Payson at [email protected]. Follow him on twitter at @paysonhall.
These days teams are compensating as best they can, but some aspects of project life are difficult with remote teams and social distancing. Celebrating milestone achievement is hard but necessary in our current circumstances.
Absent an effective requirements baseline it is difficult to distinguish clarifications and error correction from enhancements and changes to the original ask.
Building schedules for complex projects is challenging. While the results are never perfect, credible schedules are a useful communication and coordination device. Incredible schedules are a dangerous waste of time and energy that damage a project manager’s credibility and cost an enterprise a fortune.
Teams often view executives as being "against" them and making decisions that are clueless at best or nefarious at worst. Usually, neither is the case, but there's no way of knowing true motivations if there's no discussion. Teams and directors need to repair their communication rift. This is a tale of two perspectives.
In agile development, the idea of precise estimates is unrealistic. But estimates are needed to inform decision-makers about whether it's worth solving a problem as it is currently understood. It sounds counterintuitive, but instead of asking for one estimate of cost and schedule, ask for three. Here's why it's more useful.
Risk management is identifying, analyzing, mitigating, and monitoring risks to a project. Humans do this all the time with life experiences, so there are parts of risk management that come naturally to us. What needs to be learned is recognizing our biases and limits to our visualization. Ask these questions to help.
