Several weeks back I wrote about posting medium-term priorities at the top of my whiteboard as a way to keep from getting sidetracked. The three stories that I’m working on completing by the end of the week, the three outcomes I’m expecting (or expected) to produce. That continues to work well, though it might be […]
Category: Project Management
What To Do, What To Do?
If multiple people independently set priorities for your organization, are priorities really set at all? How do you know what to do when you’ve got too many “very important” tasks on your to-do list, and someone brings you another? One suggestion is to stop focusing on tasks. My personality — and I suspect that of […]
Practices of an Agile Developer
This past week, I read Practices of an Agile Developer, not because I’m currently employed as a developer, nor because my employer uses them, but because I believe the guidelines are good ones to be practiced no matter what the profession. Check out some readers’ notes, then invest some time in the book yourself, especially […]
Warming or Cooling Those Around You?
When you walk in the room today — at your office, church, hobby group, poker buddies’ place, or at home — what effect do you have on the people there? As ice cools the liquid in a drink, you can change everyone’s emotional state just by adding yourself to their midst. Are you managing your […]
No Work Email on Weekends
It’s Friday afternoon, and Tim Sanders has some thoughts on sending work-related email on weekends. These habits can ruin weekends, drive turnover and burnout and weaken relationships. In other words, not a good idea. (Unless you’re writing to schedule a job interview with me , in which case a phone call would probably be better […]
Omni Adding Project Management
Good news for any PM who’s also a Mac person in a sea of Windows users. The Omni Group’s OmniPlan is in beta, with an expected price tag of US$149. The best part of all (other than being a sweet-looking Mac app, of course): OmniPlan can open and save Microsoft Project files natively That should […]
You Get What You Measure
Al Hawkins: Productivity and the Law of Unintended Consequences: I hope they understand that this means an end to the free tech support I’ve been providing, like programming the fax machines and kickstarting the network printers when they hung. No more productivity-enhancing projects, like the wiki and the information entered therein performed during the odd […]
Write To Be Understood Quickly
From 43 Folders, a post well worth reading: Writing sensible email messages. As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, […]
KM, Blogging, and Copyright, Oh My
It’s been a while since I wrote about Knowledge Management & Blogging. While trying BlogBridge, I noticed that it comes with a set of pointers to, among other things, some KM blogs. Here are a couple that have interesting articles posted recently. Knowledge-at-work (see Sharing knowledge – do we know enough? for example), and APQC […]
Day 2: Communications
David St.Lawrence was writing the other day about communications. Well, about getting another person to listen to you, which is partly about communicating. As the guys in the sessions I taught would probably tell you — I know I said it more than enough times throughout the course — there’s something I consider paramount to […]