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Change the way you think about Project Management

dna models

Four genes driving your software vendor behaviour

As I move around from one project management assignment to another, I repeatedly find myself involved with a new software vendor. What stands out each time is how obvious and visible their underlying values and principles are underneath their day-to-day behaviour. It seems to me that there are some core ...
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/ Project Execution, Project Management Skills, Software Projects

Ten types of Project Plans – Which type is yours?

Plans Project plans and planning are inevitably a part of any project initiative. In almost all enterprise environments projects are next to impossible to initiate and to execute without a plan. By "plan" I mean any artefact that attempts to define the current and future activities and outcomes for a ...
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/ planning, plans, Project Execution, Project Management Community, Project Planning, Systems Integration

Linear and Non-Linear Thinking in Project Management

Since I put down my thoughts on Principle-based Project Management and the Project Action Principles some time back, I've been thinking and researching endlessly about the interplay between linear and non-linear cognition in the practice of Project Management, and how this interacts with our project context. I've been trying to ...
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/ Agile Concepts, Principle-based Project Management

You know the team is too large when…

If you're a startup, then your organisation is the team.  If you're in a larger enterprise, your team can start small: maybe even just with you! Either way, no matter how small you start, if you are even modestly successful, you're going to have to grow the team.  In fact, ...
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/ Leadership, Teaming

“That’s Not Agile!”

Some little while back I was trying to facilitate a change in approach in one of the projects that I was supervising.  This project was quite simple: to configure two existing PDF forms into an existing forms processing/workflow tool.  But it had gotten caught up in the machinery of large ...
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/ Agile Concepts

Thanksgiving for IT Teams: Lock in your team’s achievements!

Scrum and Agile Guru Mike Cohn wrote in his weekly Agile Tips email that we should mark the moment to focus on what our teams have achieved. Triggered by the bigtime Thanksgiving celebration in the USofA, Mike wrote how we often struggle to recognise the past good work done because ...
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/ Project Management Concepts, Project Management Skills, Uncategorized

Service Level Agreements define Unacceptable Behaviour

Service Level Agreements, or Service Levels defined in contracts, typically define maximum delays between certain events in the procedural interaction between two enterprises.   They are intended to create clarity and precision in the dealings between these two enterprises, and to balance the business priorities of the enterprises against the cost ...
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/ Customer Service, Customer Value, SLAs, Systems Integration / 1 Comment on Service Level Agreements define Unacceptable Behaviour

List Membership an indicator of influence?

I've recently published some stats about which Twitter users are listed in how many Project Management - related Lists on Twitter There have been a few comments and questions about what this data means, and why it's worth looking at. So I've done a little basic correlation between the number of ...
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/ , Project Management Community, Project Management Data

Top 250 Listed Twitter Project Management Folks

Introduction Following on from the earlier post, based on a mere 25 Twitter lists focused on Project Management, I've now updated this to a new research baseline of 908 lists.  Overwhelmingly these lists are focused on undifferentiated project management topics, although there are a small number on agile project management Remember, this ranking is ...
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/ , Project Management Community, Project Management Data

Top 100 Listed Twitter Project Management Folks

Based on the 25 Twitter lists focused on Project Management that I published earlier, here are the top 100 250 listed PM dudes. This is based on how many lists they appear in only, and doesn't represent anything else. I might, at some time, look to normalise this list somehow, in terms ...
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/ , Project Management Community

All New: the Project Management MasterClass by Adam Russell

You can benefit from my 30+ years of hands-on project management experience in a new webinar series starting very soon (15th June, 2016). I will teach you the set of principles and simple techniques that I have used over many years to deliver projects effectively.
You can achieve a big uplift of your practical PM skills by participating in this MasterClass, and learning as much about what not to do and what to ignore, as well as new perspectives and techniques to take to your projects.
What would project management look like if it was easy?
Click on the button below and find out by being a part of this great educational experience. (opens page on my services site: tiligent.com)
Show me more!

What We Offer

Principle-based Philosophy

I believe in the power of people to achieve just about anything to which they set their minds.  Human aspects of work orchestration and problem solving are paramount.

Intelligent Project Services

Services based on more natural ways that people think and work together, not on mechanistic processes and techniques.
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Content Library

Free or paid content libraries containing practical and detailed information and tools based on Principle-based Project Leadership
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Books

Adam is writing several books on the core themes of Principle-based Project Leadership, and publishing them progressively using the “lean model” of book publishing.

Blog

Shorter and more frequently posted articles with widely ranging topics, centered on the 3 primary themes of this site.  Also including links to interesting posts from other blogs, research data and summaries of surveys. Anything that looks interesting and serves our core philosophy.

Primary Themes

Principle-based Project Leadership

This approach leverages more natural ways that people think and work well together, not on mechanistic processes and techniques.
We think that it is better to have people solve problems “in the moment” than to impose a process-based method if that’s all that is required.  If more structured tools are needed (as the often are), choose the simplest one that will do the job and use it to augment the human capabilities, not replace them.
We combine “Agility” with “Discipline” and draw the best from many different sources: proven methods to achieve results.

Self-Organising Teams

Self-Organizing Teams have developed a lot of airtime in recent years, having been mentioned explicitly in the Agile Manifesto, and now being the focus of many other approaches.  The problem is that there is little in the way of guidance on how these teams work and how they need to be enabled, nurtured and protected.  There is no “manual for Self-organizing teams” that explains how it works.  Well, we’re trying to remedy that

Deliverables

The concept of ‘Deliverables Management’ has been present during much of my Project Management life but it took a long while before my understanding went beyond the superficial.  Deliverables Management is one of these ostensibly ‘self-evident’ concepts that requires no further explanation or expansion.  The term ‘deliverables’ seemed to have an obvious stand-alone meaning and was never properly described with process or usage, and therefore never properly leveraged as an effective tool in Project Management