There has been quite a bit of coverage regarding the advent of self driving cars this year. Having spent my share of time commuting in and out of Manhattan, I had plenty of hours to daydream about how hard it would be to implement—but, boy, what tremendous benefit it would be to my productivity! And the thing about rush hour: you know you are not alone, so obviously those benefits will multiply really fast. Clearly, the benefits so dramatically outweigh the costs that autonomous driving technology is actually far ahead of where I would have predicted during one of those traffic-induced daydreams.
Category Archives: Project Management
Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off, and Start All Over Again
Back in the early 1930s, when America was going through some hard times, Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire danced their way into American hearts by offering these words of encouragement—”Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again”—in the movie Swing Time. And America responded.
Too Much Information Coming At You!
It is virtually impossible to enjoy any connected electronic device today without enduring countless hours of meaningless interruptions.
I’m talking about radio, TV, Internet, smartphones and even the library research computer! Seriously—when was the last time you enjoyed commercial-free entertainment or Internet browsing? Don’t say the movie theater—unless you show up 15 minutes after the advertised start time.
TweetOne Problem at a Time
Recently, I had the chance to watch The Martian again. It’s a great movie. I don’t think I spoil anything if I say that at one point Mark Watney, the main character in the movie, declares, “At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you…everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem…and you solve the next one…and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
Forensic Project Management
We CAN learn from our mistakes…providing our project management system delivers the goods!
Through their research “Forensic Project Management: An Exploratory Examination of the Causal Behavior of Design-Induced Rework,” Peter E. D. Love, David J. Edwards and Zahir Irani found, on average, that rework contributed 52% of a project’s total cost overrun, and concluded that “having to unnecessarily repeat activities or processes that were incorrectly implemented the first time within a project can adversely affect the profitability, performance, and reputation of those organization(s) involved; as well as a project’s organizational and social fabric.”
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