Tag: project management
Territory folks
I’ve had a couple of reminders this week about the perceived differences between technical team members and the rest of us. I claim the dubious privilege of straddling the fence, as a former member of an IT shop myself, so […]
Exit Stage Left
I’ve just been involved in planning the end of a project. You might even say that we killed it before it got off the ground. At the same time, I’m helping to author a service level agreement which, of course, includes […]
Taking the Creep out of Scope Creep
You’re faced with a choice: If you pick Door Number 1, you have to add 1 new feature to the service you are creating. If you pick Door Number 2, you have to add 2 new features to the service you are creating. And if you pick […]
A habit of resilience
I’ve been reading an article in the January/February issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR), “How to Bounce Back from Adversity.” If you have access to HBR online, here’s a link. The freely available Idea in Brief is here. Based on old […]
See (how) the project runs
When I first started working at CDL, I was not used to the academic organizational culture. I was coming from a very different environment, that of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which has a quasi-governmental, quasi-corporate culture. One of […]
Project citizenship
In the fall of 2008, as CDL was gearing up to become deeply involved in HathiTrust, I was part of the team managing our efforts. We anticipated a long-term initiative encompassing many projects, committees, and workgroups, and that was just […]
What a difference time makes!
I mentioned in my first post that I’m heading up a Task Force on Project Management Skills here in the UC Library system, and we’re in the middle of our survey of people with project management experience. The first big batch […]
Learning from Detroit, or, Why projects fail
When I heard about the would-be Christmas bomber, I couldn’t help thinking, “Why haven’t the 9/11 Commission Report recommendations been implemented?” And since that day, indeed, we’ve come to find out that the various security agencies are still not talking adequately […]
Project Management Skills Survey
Improving the outcome of projects in and across the UC Libraries is increasingly important. SOPAG and the University Librarians are addressing this issue through the formation of a task force whose charge includes identifying staff that currently possess project management skills.