My monthly column at TechTarget is up:

Within the space of a couple of days I got bombarded with the notion of green project management and being an eco-friendly project manager. I am a nice guy, I print my Gantt charts on recycled strategy memos using dehydrated low-emission cow urine, so don't come to me with this eco-friendliness! … We are talking about project managers! Remember us? We need a document that describes our code of professional and social responsibility … We are hired to get things done.

Read the entire column.

Ecology, Ethics and the Project manager – A Zen Perspective

"Here it is the month in which Earth Day occurs again; so the question - “How does project management relate to ecology and environmental responsibility?” is very relevant. Let’s explore the question in light of project manager ethics and, more broadly, ethical behavior in general."

Read more

The most interesting postings of this month can be attributed to Glen Alleman at Herding Cats. Although I don't always agree, these are provoking postings that trigger your brain, and helps you to become more aware of a question I asked earlier this month: "Why Do You Do What You Do in Project Management?"

Killing the Sacred Cows of Project Management
Three Simple Questions
Thermostatic Control
The BIG Question for any project management process
Sacred Cow: Teams

Read the links above and come back and think again: why do you do what you do?

State of Indiana Makes Using Waterfall SDLC’s a Criminal Offense

”Waterfall software development lifecycles have terrorized technology projects in this state for too long,” Governor Mitch Daniels said at a simple signing ceremony held at a meeting of the Central Indiana chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). “This bill will end the tyranny of big upfront planning, big upfront design, and litigation style change management.”

Read more

My monthly column at Techtarget: Project managers cannot rely on generalizations:

Photography by Notariety.

"The second reason was given to me by Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is the human need to categorize everything. We just have to put the world around is in neat boxes. Taleb coins the term "Platonicity" for this phenomenon — "the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures." We put a label on an event and use that knowledge to reason about the future. We use this mechanism on everything, including people."

To Bet Or Not To Bet: How The Brain Learns To Estimate Risk

"Planning entails making predictions. In an uncertain environment, however, our predictions often don't pan out. And erroneous prediction of risk often leads to unusual behaviour: euphoria or excessive gambling when risk is underestimated, and panic attacks or depression when we predict that things are riskier than they really are."

The Project Cartoon

Create your own version of this famous Project Management Cartoon.

Read more