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.”
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 […]
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.
How an IT Project Management team handles and learns from mistakes and setbacks can significantly impact success, not just for the current project but across your whole current portfolio – and future projects too.
A Stoneseed BA’s day will vary depending on the client’s requirements and project type. Whether it’s an Agile, Waterfall or Hybrid environment and whether its product, Infrastructure, software or digital transformation project for example. The life of a Stoneseed Ba is very varied, on this particular day, it is a for a client who is delivering an Agile software upgrade and development project.
In IT Project Management we put so much effort into choreographing our deliverables and outcomes, the part of the process that our “audience” sees, but how much thought goes into what happens out of sight, behind the curtain?
When a colleague heard that I was heading to the RHS Tatton Garden Show in July, she said that even I couldn’t find project management teachings in the topsoil. Like most gardeners, I do love a challenge, so the gloves are, well, ON! Years of experience, and countless IT Projects under my belt, and a passion for plants and flowers! How hard can this be?
Sow, here we grow!
There are unexpected parallels even if, at first blush, horse trials and IT Project Management may seem worlds apart – I was struck by many similarities in the principles, the methods and the challenges.
WORLDS APART
Quickly, let’s compare the two.
I love this out of office reply from Collette, an IT Project leader who takes herself out of the project portfolio the first Friday and Monday of every March just to have a proper delve into how they do things, assess how aligned their resources and ambitions are, and imagine how they could operate better. A Spring Clean – what a great idea.
IT PROJECT MANAGEMENT CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT
We measure how successful our projects are all year round, in terms of Return On Investment (ROI), budgets, delivery times met, etc but an IT Project Management Capability Assessment checks in on how effective the delivery frameworks and processes that underpin project success are.
If you’ve ever trained a puppy, you’ll know the value of a “treat” to reward good behaviour, like sitting or staying on command. I think most dogs know the word “biscuit” before they learn their own name, mind you, I know some PMs who are as partial to a bourbon or chocolate malted milk, she writes dunking a digestive! At Crufts I saw a lot of treats passed from owner to dog with a “good boy” or “good girl”. Rewards are vital to the process.