Monday Morning Links – 16th November #pmot
November 16, 2009 @ How to Manage a Camel - Project Management and Recruitment from DanS
Cliche Quote of the Week…
Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.
- Butch to Sundance, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, 1969
I feel like propping up project managers this week, with Project Management Day falling on Tuesday, according to PMI UK. I know we went through the ‘When is Project Management Day?” debate last week, and I’m certainly not here to rehash it, but that time has passed and this is the last known project management day I’ve come across, so there – picked it, packed it, I’m not saying the third part.
Like I said, project managers are getting their props. For vision and projection. Amidst all of the risk management, budget constraints, stakeholder management, delegation, meetings and the like, project managers are people that have that uncanny ability to project what this baby’s gonna look like when all is said and done. They see it, talk to themselves about it, formulate it and map out the path. Vision and projection.
It begs questions: Is vivid imagination a soft skill? Is vision developed and matured somehow? Is it inborn and detectable only through the Rorschach inkblot test? Are project managers reincarnated from the creative minds of Michelangelo, Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Hughes?
We at the Camel solute you, visionaries of the project with which we entrust you. And even when things go bad (like they did so often for Butch and Sundance) and plans fail, you’re not the first profession of visionaries that had to experience a few setbacks. (CUT TO: Howard Hughes biographers all nodding in unison.)
Five For Linking
- Bruce W Benson of pmtoolsthatwork gives us the cold hard facts that restrict and reduce project “honesty buffers” – http://pmtoolsthatwork.com/using-hard-facts-to-reduce-honesty-buffers/
- Michiko Diby of Sealight LLC draws on the lessons of Gen. Colin Powell as a reminder as to why accessibility to your team is so important to leadership – http://blog.sealightllc.com/?p=707
- Josh Nankivel on pmStudent lays down some thoughts about being consistent with your projects. Unforgettable lesson is the quote from W. Edwards Deming: “Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.” – http://pmstudent.com/dont-screw-this-up-consistency/
- Virtual Project Management Consulting examines what makes projects fail, listing qualities like Detail Planning, Tangible Deliverables and Resources, among their list of 10 – http://www.virtualprojectconsulting.com/projectfailure/
- Like Elaine Benes’s former shrink/boyfriend on Seinfeld, Brad Egeland of PM Tips has a svengali-like hold over the Monday Morning Links. The Ege lays out an effective template for that necessary evil in project management: the change order request - http://pmtips.net/project-change-order-request-version-1/
Tweeter to Watch: @ProjectShrink – That Elaine Benes/Shrink connection proved to be a good segueway, didn’t it?
Bas de Baar is the man behind the Project Shrink blog, a standout on Twitter who endeavours each day on your TweetDeck to further his standing to ‘discuss Project Leadership in a global and virtual world’. The vibe and feel of his work is often humourous and never dull. There is a humanity in what he does, because it is his goal in the subheading to his blog title:
‘Project Leadership. Social Media. Because Projects Are About Humans.’
You can’t do much better on Twitter than the Shrink.
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