The Sunday Lunch Project

When talking to one of my project managers about plan compliance it hit me that plans are not just the tool by which the PM manages the project and communicates to their team,but also the basis for corporate, customer and stakeholder updates. It sounds obvious but having all project planning to a corporate standard is not just about some ivory tower indivdual setting standards without knowing what it is like at the coal face but about being able to see a total view of project delivery for the whole organisation. The clarity came after listening to podcast by Manager Tools, they recently talked about how each task we handout or is handed to us includes reporting on completion and, if it is a long enough task progress reporting. Reporting is part of the task, not an addition, so it follows that a plan updated on a weekly basis is part of the project not an overhead. We have all undoubtably had the conversation with team members that if they did not have to report on what they wer

Under promise, under deliver vs. Over promise, under deliver which one is better there is only one way to find out............FIGHT. Stakeholder management and setting expectations of customers is always a minefield, I have seen differing approaches adopted and they tend to be extremes. The sales guy trying to win the new piece of business tends to over play the poisitives and is willing to take bigger risks. In contrast you have the delivery team being risk averse focussing on how difficult the project is. Both of them are wrong in my view. Fundamentally as a project manager we need to be honest to ourselves and to our stakeholders, if we catch ourselves thinking, we should be able to do that but have no clue how to then say so. Don't operate on a wing and a prayer. If we think just to be safe lets add in a bunch of contingency, then challenge ourselves to think "How have I calculated that? What is the unknown element and have I thought about the assumptions and quantif

I have created a new page on the blog which will list resources for all project managers, be they new to it or experienced. The links are to things that I have benefited from and hope you do too.  If by doing so I help one PM find something that will make the next stakeholder meeting a little less tense or the words for the next project update simpler then I am happy. I will add to this list over time but if you have a recommendation just add a comment to this post or drop me a mail. Here is the link http://thesundaylunchproject.blogspot.com/p/other-project-management-sitesblogs.html All the best and I hope you find it useful.

Well I have succumbed to setting up a page on facebook to promote the blog.  I will try to keep info flowing on all media. I will keep this blog as my main postnig area for now but will try to link up the two soon.

Well it comes to that time of the year where every blogger starts to use analogies from Christmas and the New Year to make their point.  Some use it as an illustration of a point, others as a pun, on principle I am not going to do that, just to be controversial. That said I cannot really criticise the story telling nature of communication, that is fundamentally the basis for my book. (Yes it does exist, it is coming, I am working on it. Honest!!!).  So why did I choose this way to get my point across?  1. To keep me interested My natural tendency is to gravitate to the new and interesting things in life and once I get a general view I can loose interest and motivation. 2. To keep the reader interested Some subjects, no matter how interested you are in them, when you get down to the gritty details are not very enthralling, this may result in erratic behaviour like preferring to do the washing up or take our the trash. 3. To tie in some emotion I believe that we all learn thin

This year I have been embarking on a new project which involved a vegetable garden including varying attempts, some successful, some not so.  A couple of weeks ago I looked over my garden and realised a that it was all coming to an end, tomatoes plants wilting, last or the runner beans and no more peas, boo hoo! As I looked at what was a fairly pathetic vision I felt a real pang of sadness and this reminded me that this feeling was similar to that which you get at the end of a project following the weeks, and sometimes months of furore leading up to the big release date or grand opening, the daily prayers, amazingly innovative solutioneering, the cry of "We did not know we needed that!", patiently explaining to your sponsor that more scope means more cost and delay and of course more pizza that you shake a stick at. Then you sit there at your PC at 5pm, your inbox is empty except for a couple of group HR emails, you have the minutes from the post project evaluation report

Just had a couple of weeks where all there seems to be is funding uncertainty around all projects, against which is a driver to be more robust at following process following a recent audit.  This goes against the Sunday Lunch PM ethos of putting in place enough control to do a good job not just because a process document or delivery methodology say do it, one size does not fit all. (needs a snappy definition I think). Its easier to be risk averse and make sure you have crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's but this leads to increased costs and reduced flexibility which in the current climate is the wrong thing to be doing. So I pose a question how do you manager the time, cost, quality triangle when you have increased restrictions on time and increased focus on quality the only flex becomes time and that with all project is always up against it.  They usually start later than needed for the work to be done, and then you get scope gallop, and suddenly a key busine

I had a long day yesterday and little access to my email, so while watching Jamie does...... I checked my mail and I found a number of emails which were marked as important so naturally had a look at those first.  To my surprise one of the mails was a list of training courses available for the coming month and my first reaction was "Why has this person marked this as important, it's not important to me." and following on from this I have been thinking about relative importance of emails. I do not, as a matter of course, use the important button unless I am sending something to my team that I want them look at quickly.  As I do not do it often the impact appears to be OK because they check the mails I send them pretty quickly anyway but this extra emphasis gets the results. When sending an email to someone who is not in my team I very, very, rarely use the important button because important is a subjective assessment.  Things that I consider important in my role may be

I am sat in the doctors waiting room and the doctor is running an hour late. That now puts me an hour late. Somehow I will have to either catch up the time or write it off and hope the some form of karma will give me an hour back sometime in the future. It makes me think that this is how we can end up having project problems, someone slips on a dependency for you or the resource is not available to start on time. On the face of it what's an hour? Either the resource will pick up the slipped hour or we can do a bit of overtime later if needed. Then later arrives, the person doing the work did not catch up the hour they did the job is 32 hours as estimated, 20 other minor slips happen and you are now 200 hours down and it's Friday and just a weekend before go live, you only have 3 people available to help. How the hell did I get in this mess, nothing major has happenned. Does this sound familiar? Maybe a bit extreme? As a PM it makes me think we all need to be mindful of thes

Just got an email from a company in the states saying they are liking my work on the blog and want to contribute and give me some of their products for free to use or offer as a prize. Got no idea whether I think this is a good idea or not, on the one hand it means I will get some more content for the site, but in the other hand I need to be to sure that the content is aligned with values of the Sunday Lunch Project. I will have a chat with the guy who runs the firm but I am quite shocked considering I have little content on the site for the the past few weeks. I have tweaked the first paragraph of the book and developed a few more of the plot ideas, characters and twists. It's gonna take time but I am determined to finish this one.

Now I have not done a lot so far, but ideas continue to flow and my notes are increasing. I have found that alternative ideas spring to mind and have gone back to a couple of my other book ideas and done some work on those. So I am thinking that the only I can get myself going is to set my self some task related goals and rewards. So number 1 is that I will write in my blog at least once per week, be it about the book or about project management in general. So this week I thought I would share a couple of sites which you may find of interest if you are interested in project management. Firstly an author in the UK who launched his book last year and has been getting good reviews and seems to be on every PM related podcast around the world. Peter Taylor has published the book the Lazy Project Manager which takes a slightly different approach to thinking about the priorities of managing projects you can find out more at www.thelazyprojectmanager.com Secondly the podcast where I first

So I thought I would share how this idea came about and it evolved. I had been thinking of article ideas to help me practice for writing my other book and to get some feedback on my style. To get some additional benefit I thought I would target the content at project management which, if published, would allow me to claim it as a continued professional development activity and assist in keeping my PMI qualification (more information can be found here http://www.pmi.org.uk/ ) So while on a caravan holiday in a lovely South Wales site in Wiseman's Bridge I started putting down my ideas using a mindmap, and thought I would have the makings of a reasonable article. The thing was as I sat there with a bunch of coloured pencils and a pad the ideas start to run and the gallop and in front of me was more than enough material for an article and then I thouught could this be a book. Since then I had not done anything much with it or my other books until I read Peter Taylors book thelazypr

A new year and a new decade is here. Over the past few years I have had a bunch of ideas for a book and started a couple of them. About this of year a couple of years ago I set myself a goal of trying to finish the book I was working on by the end of that year. I made some good progress but lost momentum, at the same time I came up with the idea for this one.  Hopefully by updating this blog I will start to get some interest and a little external pressure and expectation to push me along. Anyway if there is anyone out there Happy New Year. Powered by ScribeFire .

Well I started, and I decided to use Google apps so that I am not restricted by being near a specific PC to do it. I have written the introduction chapter and I am quite please with it. I am going to write it in first person mode kind of Sam Spade detective style. I have my hero and at least 4 or 5 other characters. I have also had a though about the logo design so some forward movement.

What is this all about. Well I had an idea, having spent many year managing projects and trying to decide what level of governance needs to be applied to projects and though about the analogy of cooking a chicken dinner and how you could completely over manage it. Hopefully this would also allow an opportunity to learn the type of governance which could be applied and be a bit of a laugh too Anyway this is the start of the book, and I will give updates on the progress overtime.