Browse > Home / Herding Cats, Project Management News / The Whole Brain Look at Project Management

The Whole Brain Look at Project Management

December 1, 2009 @ Herding Cats from Glen B. Alleman

In Rechtin's Systems Architecture book, there is a list of what makes a good system architect. The system architect he speaks of is not the IT architect - although in the 2nd edition, he includes that. It is the product architect. Products like GPS, the Space Shuttle, complex military and civilian systems.

A recent paper in the INCOSE Systems Engineering Journal, revisits this concept. "Whole Brain Thinking in System Architecting," Tony Di Carlo, Behrokh Khoshnevis, and Firdaus Udwadia, Volume 13, Number 3.

I'd conjecture these attributes can be found in good project managers as well:

  1. Communication skills 
  2. High tolerance for ambiguity 
  3. The ability to make good associations of ideas 
  4. The ability to work consistently at an abstract level 
  5. A level of technical expertise 
  6. A tempered ego; the opposite of arrogance 
  7. Leadership; gets the most out of others 
  8. The willingness to backtrack, to seek multiple solutions 
  9. The ability to build teams 
  10. Charisma 
  11. The ability to read people well 
  12. Self-discipline, self-confidence, a locus of control 
  13. A purpose orientation 
  14. A sense of faith or vision 
  15. Drive, a strong will to succeed 
  16. Curiosity, a generalist’s perspective

So now, assuming my conjecture is applicable, where do tools fit into the discussion of increasing the probability of project success?

   
 

Related Posts


This article is syndicated from Project Shrink . The original article is available here. Read more in Project Management News, Project Shrink .


Tags: ,
Reminder : PMToolbox has ZERO tolerance to copyright violation and agrees to follow strictly PMI's Professional Responsibility. That's why each post on this site includes a link to the original version at its source site.

Comments

Got something to say?






Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes
Project Management Resources | Project Management Templates | Project Management Books | Project Management Software

pmtoolbox.org is your one stop source for project management, project management software,project management books, project management templates, project management news, project management glossary,project management tools...