I’m very excited to be in Dallas this week to speak in person at the 15th Annual University of Texas Dallas Project Management Symposium. This is a great event every year and I couldn’t be happier to have been asked to speak. My topic is: Is the Era of the Project Management Office at an End? Which I’ll be presenting on Tuesday, May 23rd. If you will there, please say hi!
I’m delighted to be speaking on a couple of different topics at the Minnesota PMI Professional Development Days (PDD) this year. This is the first in-person meeting of the PDD for the PMI-MN in two years and I’m excited to be a part of it. I’ll be speaking about creating a hybrid environment in a session called “Bringing Agile, Project Management and Portfolio Management together” and then a second Symposium Day session called “The Perils…
In our business we are often asked if data from one system can be integrated to another. There’s almost a pull for people to say “If I can integrate it, I must”. That’s just not true. Let’s look at an example where integrating might cause a negative impact. Years ago I was asked if I could integrate project scheduling data with Outlook. “Look,” said the client who was an IT specialist, “Outlook task data…
I have a mobile phone from Verizon. One day, soon after I’d upgraded my phone, it chirped in the car. “Your Verizon team is ready for you,” it said. I was unnerved. What did they mean? Why are they saying that? Then, I looked up and saw that I was stopped at a red light outside a Verizon store. I was somewhat stunned for a few minutes as I took in this new level of…
This is my forth recession since starting HMS Software. I’m not liking this one any better than I liked the first three. We started HMS in 1984 just after the 1981-82 recession that was driven by middle east oil prices. It was a period of great growth that was accompanied by a huge expansion of technology. In 1990 we’d been in business for a few years already and inflation issues jumped in to cause a…
Many years ago, the London Tube; the subway system, created a slogan reminding people to look down and step carefully between the platform and the train. It’s become such a symbol of London that we see not only the Mind the Gap symbol on t-shirts but memes of all kinds to “Mind the… Something”. Last week here at HMS, we came across a gap. It was a process gap and because of checks and balances…
With money flooding into the economy and huge incentives to get the economy back underway, governments at federal, state and municipal levels are looking for innovative ways to get projects underway. One of the best already-established paths is the “Public-Private Partnership (PPP). That’s not to be confused with the other popular PPP acronym at the moment for the US Payroll Protection Plan. What is a PPP? A public-private partnership is a project which is a…
Is it harder to deploy an enterprise system when you aren’t co-located? Of course. But, it is much more common than you might think. If we think of deploying a system to a small business where everyone is in the same building, then communicating and encouraging use of the new system is easy to imagine. As the new system is designed and configured, the people doing that work are walking along the same corridor as…
As expected, I have more changes to report on speaking engagements that I had been asked to speak at have been postponed or changed. The ProjectWorld / Business Analyst World show scheduled for late May in Toronto been rescheduled to December 14-17. My talk there will be rescheduled to somewhere within those dates.
In the last few weeks we have seen numerous clients and other organizations move to having their workers work from home. For some of these organizations this has been a smooth and seamless transition. For others not so much. As we’ve described on our blog in my own firm HMS, the move from working on premise to working remotely has been very easy but this is because we had already put a plan in place…