Photography by Kyknoord.

Wild Success in 2008 through Optimism and High Self-esteem

"Unrealistic optimism and high self-esteem are key factors in individual and team success. However the project management environment isnt exactly brimming with unbridled optimism and positive reinforcement. Quite the opposite. Many projects are highly challenging, some are carried out in unsupportive environments, and sometimes success is measured only by what percent of some impossible task was achieved."
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With large groups and a lot of time pressure you don't always spend enough effort in communicating the overall perspective of the project. Too bad, because emphasizing the "bigger picture" helps stakeholders to keep in line and, if done properly, enhance motivation among the team (they wanna be part of something cool). Here are two tips to save you time and help you out in this department.
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Tiger Teams vs. Agile Project Management Practices
"Often times when introducing some of the basic agile project management practices to new teams (for example, the daily standup) some of the more experienced (ok, older) team members comment on the fact that these techniques look a lot like the techniques they used in the past when their projects were in deadline trouble."

Mingle on my Wii: The Purple Cow of Agile Project Management Tools
"The next thing I got working on the Wii was Mingle. I was inspired by the YouTube video of Agile 2007 where Studios was demonstrating Mingle on a Wii to the conference attendees. All I had to do was point the Wiis Opera browser to an instance of Mingle running from my laptop on the local network, and lo and behold Mingle was right there on my Wii."

Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development
"For the last four years ThoughtWorks has operated a lab in Bangalore India to support our software development projects in North America and Europe. Traditional approaches to offshore development are based on plan-driven methodologies, but we are very firmly in the agile camp. Here I discuss our experiences and lessons learned in doing offshore agile development. So far we've discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate."
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Top 10 Estimation Best Practices
"I have written a few posts now on estimation and so I thought it was time for a summary. "

Estimating The ˜Social impact on Project Management
"I was thinking about how many projects I have been part of, how many project plans I made, and how many of them actually succeeded. I could not think of any that were as planned - on time and budget, no matter how good the tools I used were. There is an old saying "Man plans, and God Laughs." How true, how true!"

Project management a job commodity?
"But the reality is that IT is still hard, and though there have been much improvements in terms of tools, skills and management of IT related tasks, there is still currently a high demand for high quality IT related skills sets. A Network World article lists the top 8 IT jobs for 2008…"

A Critical Look At Executive Decision Making
"The reality, however, is that for many projects failure is dialed in from the beginning. The greatest challenge that organizations face is not how the project is managed, or who manages it - but simply how the choice is made."

Establishing Your Project Management Authority
"It's been a tough climb to your project management position. How do you establish your authority and inspire respect? What must be done to influence project results and growth and make your stay long and productive?"

DoubtSourcing.com
"A weekly (and weakly funny) comic about IT outsourcing."

Is Project Management Passe?
"Gartner isn't saying that PM is going the way of the Dodo Bird as a discipline or skill set; to the contrary, they are saying it has/will essentially become commoditized as a common element of the general management repertoire ” think more along the lines of gulls and starlings. I have to agree on that point."

Is Project Management a Fad?
"An emerging theme that I have encountered in conversations of late is the perception that project management is becoming the latest management fad. Interestingly, my reaction has ranged from "Is it?" to "Already?" to "Why did it take this long?"

"Stockholm Syndrome" in project execution and management
"What do you think on the Stockholm Syndrome in project execution and management? Did you ever experience or observed it? Did you ever try to help? The Stockholm Syndrome is the behavior of kidnap victims who become sympathetic to their captors. "

Motivation in Virtual Teams: Lessons from Virtual Worlds
"Last week I read a report called Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMOGs), put out by an organization called Seriosity. Their study investigated the lessons that MMOGs might have for leadership in the workplace, with the suggestion that experience in MMOGs or virtual worlds crosses over to real work and leadership situations."

Small Team Collaboration: Seven Key Beliefs To Work As A Great Team
"What makes great teams be such? Is it a matter of coincidental matters that some teams perform systematically above average or being a high performance team is due to specific traits of those that make the team up?"

Managing IT Projects
"I'm often asked how we manage IT projects. Do we have an Enterprise Project Management Office? A tracking Gantt chart for every project?"

Shameless Self Promotion: Me On Better Projects
Thanks Craig "So I asked Bas, where he sees Project Sociology fitting in to that spectrum, and why is it he seems to becoming an agile enthusiast?"

What Do We Know

"The capacity of humans to deceive each other is well documented by history and personal experience. Less well known, however, is the capacity of most living things to deceive each other - species deceiving other species, members of their own species and themselves. We are, it seems, not that different from parasites, insects and bacteria in this regard."

Check out the cool collection of audio interviews at ITConversations for more gems like this one.

What do you wish your CEO knew about Agile?

"If you could get the boss to understand one thing, just ONE THING, related to Agile development… what would it be? Why that?"

Accountability: A Self-Check

"I've been thinking lately about the subject of accountability. After communication, accountability is the issue that my clients most often point out as areas that need improvement. As a manager, holding my employees accountable was probably my biggest challenge."

Project Headaches “ More to Come

"Computerworld does an annual Vital Signs survey of IT managers. The number one management challenge identified by respondents is now Managing Projects. This is up from its number three ranking last year."

Project Euler

"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

Primate Programming

"Humans and higher primates share approximately 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects."