In The Tall Grass

One of the giant fears I have is the short term, small picture, expedient view our leadership and many Americans have. Everything is in faster cycles now, 6 month product cycles in technology, Wall Street’s preoccupation with the present cycle. Speed, when it sacrifices process, where process is necessary to the outcome, is a problem. That's the definition of expedience. I don't want expedient. I want efficient (for things) and effective (for people). Slowness, when process isn't complex or is ubiquitous is also problem. But it is important we differentiate when each of these is the case. It requires critical thinking. During Covid, process was highlighted in vaccine approval. They went as fast as they could but they determined essential process, given the risks, and moved forward. It was not expedient, despite the political pressure for expedience. One of the problems is that many Americans saw the political push for expedience and subsequently related that to the vaccine ...

I built this tool to enable project planning which needed a diverse set of input, remotely. Although I prefer this exercise in a room, with post-it notes, pandemic safety mandates I do this another way - although my teams are frequently widely distributed anyway. This is available for your use as well: Presentation can be found: This Link Task Spreadsheet can be found: This Link

Oversimplification. We have all been subject to it at some point. At best it is niavete and at worst it is manipulation. Frequently it is used to try to be expedient, which in my mind (and adminitedly, in the mind of my father) a bad word.  Expedience is the cutting of corners to get something done faster, cheaper, with smaller impact than required - it's the removal of fundemntal process. It's getting by, perhaps, but sometimes with considerable loss in the process. It's different than determining you don't need the full result. It is requiring the full result without understanding or supporting the full effort. What do I mean? Oversimplification in this case is the reduction of the importance of or the effort untertaken to produce something. When a manager picks a date two days away and tells you that five days of work needs to be done by then. Either they don't understand the work, only care that you say it is done or don't care about how much time you ...

Slack. "Extra". The root of "Slacker". In project management, it's the "non-productive" time between tasks (like waiting for cement to dry). But I'm here to talk about it in a more general, universal sense. Forget the bad reputation it's forged and step back with me for a few minutes. In this world, where we rush from one objective to the next, pack out time with meetings, slam email, phone calls and paperwork in between that, we find ourselves neglecting much in the name or productivity. Has any of these things happened to you?; Forgotten to eat? Gotten to appointments 3 minutes late because the last meeting you were in ran right up to the last minutes.  In those last minutes explaining to your phone call that you had to leave the room and subsequently the conversation was over? Realized that you have held your need to go to the restroom over multiple meetings? The list can go on and on. This is because there is no slack in your...

I’d like to talk a little bit about non-employee project labor – consultants or contractors. I was am IT consultant and contractor for many years before I hired in house at a former customer. Larger projects or undertakings that require certain expertise require services typically from outside. What I specifically want to address today is how to bring them into the fold. In many organizations, they are kept at arms length, treated well by some, very differently. Unless they specifically need to be different (like in the case of management consultants, where differentiation is the point), project contractors should be, for most intents and purposes, treated as employees. Yes – they are not employees and there are key differences (frequently hourly vs a salaried employee, works for another company, your company’s legal staff is worried about their eventual lawsuit claiming to be an employee and suing for back pay or benefits), but motivationally, they are an employee and a stakehold...