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.”
Some Assembly Required
Customized pizza? It almost sounds silly. A Blaze Pizza franchise opened in our town this year and it is really quite amazing. Sure they feature a super-thin crust, which violates my New York-style pizza roots, but they use quality ingredients to create my very own tasty and satisfying pizza in about 5 minutes.
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.”
Tweet10 Project Manager Resolutions for Every New Year
Every new year means New Year Resolutions! I see evidence of this each year at my gym, which gets very crowded during the month of January. Many people focus on their personal lives, resolving to eat better, exercise more, and improve their relationships with others. And that’s all very good. However, if you are a project manager or the owner of a project-centric business, the start of a new year is but one time to resolve to improve your work life.
Build It and They Will Come
Have you seen Field of Dreams? You may recall it as a sentimental fairy tail with a feel good ending. But is it about building a ball field in a strange place? Or is it about having a vision that connects dots no one else can see? Or about seeing that vision through to its logical conclusion?