Reforming Project Management

This is an excellent blog on project management and development: Reforming Project Management. It also, coincidentally, happens to be written by someone who works in the AEC industry (architecture, engineering, construction), which might interest some people I work with.

I like it because it has good stuff on quality (lots on Toyota right now), some good book pointers, and some nice commentary on methods in projects and leadership. I just read the entire current page of articles from the top down, without realizing I was still on the same site.

Hal's definition of project: "A project is a single-purpose network of commitments undertaken by a temporary social system."

Face it. Projects are temporary organizations. People come together on projects as strangers. We're not likely to change that. What we can do is make sure people share a context, have intentions that are aligned, and have a relationship that allows them to successfully coordinate action together.

And while I'm at it, this isn't at all a bad article on Dr. Dobbs about short-term-high-profile-crisis projects: Quick-Kill Project Management. The authors suggest 3 things are indispensable, for project success under really crappy crisis conditions:

• Vision and scope document
• Work breakdown structure
• Code review

Since Dobbs is a software journal, the insight into doing good work breakdowns and code reviews was useful even independent of the topic of crisis management.