David Cotgreave
Written Articles
Feel free to steal the question to brighten your Christmas dinner table as much as it did ours! And by that, I mean that not only did we pull our first Christmas crackers – we also had our first argument of the festive season! One diner piped up that “June also has three birthstones” and found a website to ‘prove’ it, another got quite heated about the fact that it was more nuanced because there were modern and traditional birthstones for each month. A third sarcastically asked, “Who even believes in birthstones? Next, you’ll tell me you believe in signs of the zodiac and horoscopes.”
It is like a frustrating game of hide and seek.
To be fair, if it’s any consolation, it isn’t just IT!
A survey by Manpower Group suggests that worldwide, across all industry sectors and company sizes, the average declaring difficulties finding talent is about 75%, and in the UK it’s even higher – 80%.
So, if your job is to resource IT projects – you’re doing so in both a sector and a country where you are up against above average talent shortages! You deserve a medal … or a stiff drink!
It’s ironic that few people ‘remember, remember’ the second line of this English folk verse about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 … a reminder …
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot.
Would Guy Fawkes et al have made good project managers? The answer is certainly NOT.”
For fun, in this blog let’s “post-mortem” the Gunpowder plot, as we might a failed IT Project, who knows there might be some actual lessons that we can learn. (SPOILER: THERE WILL BE!).
As I write, we are clearly coming into cold and flu season! Television and radio are full of adverts for over-the-counter medicines for coughs, blocked noses and sore throats and my social media feeds are full of home-made remedies – green ginger wine, rum, honey, boiling water, chilli, 2 drops each of rosemary and eucalyptus […]
Many business change initiatives are IT Projects these days and for charities, where resources are limited, effective deployment and delivery can mean the difference between success and failure.
In business and IT Project delivery, it’s not just the uncertain and challenging weather to prepare for – a season of uncertain tax and business costs is looming on the horizon too. Is your business and its IT project team ready for the storm?
In 15 years Stoneseed has revolutionised the project-resource-on-demand market with our Project Management as a Service (PMaaS) resourcing model and our P3MO platform (which appropriately leans heavily into Microsoft’s project tools that are, arguably, direct results of Nadella’s change of culture).
Do you find that you don’t have or can’t find talent with the exact skills to deliver your IT Projects? As projects become more complex are you struggling to juggle relationships with an ever-snowballing cast of stakeholders? Are the Projects in your portfolio increasingly outside your core expertise? Are your IT Projects now driving business change to the point that YOU now directly influence the future of your business? Are your budgets and deadlines tighter and yet stakeholder expectations greater than ever? Are you finding that your IT Projects necessitate pulling talent away from already assigned duties?
As if talent gaps and shortages, ever increasing demands, and ever mounting pressure (on return on investment, budgets and timescales) were not enough – IT Project resourcing managers are facing a new challenge!
OOO!!! The “out of office” season!!!
I say “new”, let’s be honest, it’s a seasonal, recurring, annual challenge and one that, despite this, we never seem prepared for! I swear time speeds up between holidays.
We invest a lot of time, energy and budget on the “self-care” of our IT projects, in terms of robust governance, strong PMO (Project Management Office) and world-class processes, etc – but do we pay enough attention to our individual or team’s self-care?
Given the anecdotal stress, work-overload and burn-out in our industry, I’m thinking – NO.