Project managers often face tough times when they need to pull the strings that may make others uncomfortable. Those mainly include conducting project reviews for balancing the triple constraints, facilitating the reviews of the deliverables for quality or compliance, and providing constructive criticism to the team members for corrective or preventive actions.

Everyone likes to hear or deliver good news, however good project managers are expected to be the experts at relaying when things don’t go as planned, typically coupled with a pro-active solution.

The following are the most successful approaches good project managers often practice.

The February issue of the Scrum Alliance’s eNewletter presented an article by Henrik Kniberg, an Agile & Lean coach at Crisp in Stockholm and member of the board of directors of the Agile Alliance.

Many of you might find this to be a funny question but almost daily I am asked, “what would you suggest as a platform for the development of XYZ Application --- .Net or Java?” or better yet “which one is better, .Net or Java?” Quite honestly, this is a loaded question and cannot be answered without significant analysis into both technical factors and a comprehensive review of the overall organization structure, existing investment, and review of why and what business problems XYZ application is being built to solve.   

Introduction:

This month’s blog entry explores the complex relationship between project success and project leadership.  Risk of failure is potentially higher for IT projects than commonly acknowledged and, by all accounts, it would appear that success hinges less on strict adherence to methodology than on leadership.  Leadership, of course, assumes manifold forms, but in the context of this discussion I narrow it down to its core:  the moral/ethical responsibility of project managers to "tell it like it is," so that appropriate decision-makers can make effective decisions in a timely manner.

This is the third and final part of the Project Management Leadership series, the first of which was published on 8/18.  Here we make the link between success, leadership, and ethics explicit.  Ethics in project management elude rigid definition,but realism (rather than optimism) is critical to every organization's ability to think critically and to maximize the opportunities for effective and timely decisions at every organizational level.

Introduction:

This month’s blog entry explores the complex relationship between project success and project leadership.  Risk of failure is potentially higher for IT projects than commonly acknowledged and, by all accounts, it would appear that success hinges less on strict adherence to methodology than on leadership.  Leadership, of course, assumes manifold forms, but in the context of this discussion I narrow it down to its core:  the moral/ethical responsibility of project managers to "tell it like it is," so that appropriate decision-makers can make effective decisions in a timely manner.

This is the second of three parts, the first of which was published on 8/18.  Here we shine the spotlight on ethics in the context of project success.  Ethics in project management elude rigid definition, particularly as the PM discipline has evolved to encompass truly global projects, but even so, project management success is not synonymous with project success.

Introduction: 

This month’s blog entry explores the complex relationship between project success and project leadership.  Risk of failure is potentially higher for IT projects than commonly acknowledged and, by all accounts, it would appear that success hinges less on strict adherence to methodology than on leadership.  Leadership, of course, assumes manifold forms, but in the context of this discussion I narrow it down to its core:  the moral/ethical responsibility of project managers to "tell it like it is," so that appropriate decision-makers can make effective decisions in a timely manner. 

This entry will be published in 3 parts:

• Part 1 will discusses some of the long-term trends in project management, that have been recorded over the last 15 years.  Given the ever-growing emphasis on rigorous management of IT projects, the interpretation of these findings continues being debated, but the conclusions are unambiguous.
• Part 2 will shine the spotlight on ethics in the context of project success.  Ethics in project management elude rigid definition, particularly as the PM discipline has evolved to encompass truly global projects, but even so, project management success is not synonymous with project success. 
• Part 3 will make the link between success, leadership, and ethics explicit.

I’m curious what experience others have had in this regard.  Are there other aspects of leadership that play a pivotal role in your projects?  Are ethics a primary driver of decision-making in your organization… or an ancillary consideration?  What effect have these played on the successful delivery of your projects? 

Please feel free to comment below.

Switching out your Weblogic Page Flow Controllers in favor of Spring Controllers is easier than you might think. Here are just a few steps to help the integration.

Dependencies

The latest production release version of Spring is version 3.0.2. In this version they have broken the release into about 20 different jar files. The libraries listed below are those that you will need to include in the WEB-INF/lib your project:

Need uber-guru types who are willing to challenge the existing groupthink on design and architecture, especially on TDD and emergent design and pair programming anti-pattern” – job post at Monster.com 2/9/2010

I stumbled upon that quote following links on the role of the architect on an agile project. Maybe one important role of the architect is to help the team avoid groupthink.

Information Management recently sent around their pick of best IM blog articles of 2009.  Among them was Forrester’s James Kobelius’s reaction to Bill Inmon’s “incineration of a straw man concept that he refers to as ‘virtual data warehousing (DW).’”