Tagged: Management

After sales service

Having spent a long time as a customer it continues to frustrate me that many companies seem to neglect existing customers, it seems illogical to me: We want existing customers to be repeat customers Existing happy customers are a wonderful sales asset Existing customers are where we prove that we...

Retaining the best

Attracting and retaining best staff is becoming a bigger issue, my experience has always been that leadership, flexibility and freedom are big factors in retention.  CnnMoney.com has a useful article that describes what the next generation are looking for and it seems to be more of the same: 77% of...

A whole new way of presenting

One of my most popular posts was a mind map that attempted to capture the main themes of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind.  Presentation Zen has a great post which applies the themes in the book to presentations and it’s well worth a read.  I particularly liked one of the...

The future of work

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to come across a recorded talk by Thomas Malone on the future of work.  Tom is a great speaker and conveys his key messages very clearly, and the implications of the message is definitely important for anyone working on personal knowledge...

Want to waste a day trying to improve your productivity?

This is a great list of tools for note taking of various kinds.  If you find yourself wanting to waste a day you might like to work through them all and have a go.  For the record I didn’t try them out as OneNote seems to meet my needs pretty...

Want to find out more about mind mapping?

This week has been mind mapping week on my blog, and this will be the last post on the subject for a while.  Chuck Frey emailed me to provide details of his Mind Mapping Resource Center which is definitely worth checking out,  it has links to articles reviewing most of...

An Architects Perspective on IT Programme Management

I have managed a lot of IT Infrastructure projects in my time, and a couple of smaller programmes.  I have also keenly observed the management of several large programmes as a Chief Architect.  This article is written from this perspective.

 

Some initial observations:

 

  1. IT Infrastructure Projects generally fail from at least one perspective and often more
  2. IT Infrastructure projects look superficially simple
  3. The programmes have been overly influenced by the personality and skills of the Programme Director

 

The following are a set of Article Titles that I intend to write over the next year or so; they give you a good idea of the issues I think are important:

 

  1. What does he do? The importance of top down Journal keeping to programme communication, coordination and team spirit
  2. The need for a balanced management team instead of Super Men
  3. Management information is a team resource
  4. The customer is not the same as the client
  5. Objectives and Requirements, why they are different and both important
  6. The importance of programme maturity reviews
  7. Conceptual integrity and how easy it is to loose it
  8. The lost art of estimating – take different perspectives
  9. How to plan a programme, top …