I’ve tried a couple of the social network services. Many are too much work. I like Ryze the best…so far. But this MyDoom delivers mail from friends of friends’ friends. Are there really that many PCs out there without virus protection?
Monthly Archive for January, 2004
I learned the hard way when a bunch of friends, er, I mean employees, could not, or would not pull their weight.
A number of employees, all of them perfectly pleasant as drinking buddies or dinner companions, had grown complacent, behaving as though they had earned some kind of tenure. Even some longtime friends were slacking off. “I figured if I hired my buddies, they’d work their butts off for me,” Baker says. Instead, he had to fire two of them. The last straw came one night at happy hour when one of his salespeople–the brother of a college pal–got drunk and proclaimed that he could do a better job than Baker and was starting a rival business. It was then that Baker realized he had a lot to learn about the difference between being a friend and being a boss.
Read the whole article: Inc.com | Why Can’t We Be Friends? If you run or have run a small business, you’re well aware of the predicaments the subjects of this article have encountered!
I know I wrote about business blogs in my last newsletter, but in researching the article I read a lot of sources, which now I would like to share with you. Baseline magazine had Are You Ready to Love Blogging? and the book, “We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs” has Chapter 8 devoted to the business blog. It talks about workgroup blogs and project blogs, which I think are perfect uses for blogging.
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal – SiliconValley.com has a great entry Business Blogging and Why it Can Work and includes numerous links. About.com has a short article What a Business Blog Can Do For You and you can read 5 Key Questions To Ask About Business Blogs at MarketProfs.
Speaking of best practices, here’s an interesting article from Allen Weiss at MarketingProfs: Be Very Wary of Best Practices and Case Studies.
“In the end, case studies and best practices might be useful, and by no means am I saying to avoid them. But look at them with a very critical (even skeptical) eye. Make sure you don’t do what another company has done unless you are in the same place.”
Last night I went to a meeting of the Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Project Management Institute. Every year in January, we have the Kerzner Award Dinner Meeting, with a presentation of the Kerzner Award. Dr. Kerzner is the preeminent project manager and we are lucky that he lives, teaches and works in NE Ohio. If your interested in PM, you need to hear him speak or read any of his great texts.
During his presentation of Advanced Project Management: Best Practices on Implementation, my ears perked up a couple of items, but one statement in particular was great to hear.
“Businesses should be run as a project.”
I agree 100%. The trinity of project management–cost, quality and time– is the same concern or goal in business….of any type. It is becoming evident that as businesses and the corporate environment (legal, financial, HR, marketing and the rest) become more complex, business managers are turning to project management to provide a systematic methodology. You do not have to be building a factory or developing an ERP package to be using project management best practices. The methodology works in developing new products, establishing new offices, mergers & acquisitions, process re-engineering and every process needed in managing a business. Perhaps soon we will see a “BMBOK, the Business Management Body of Knowledge,” or just make the PMBOK, the Project Management Body of Knowledge required reading for managers and executives.
I always rant about hourly fees and try to convince my potential clients to move to a project-based or fixed fees. Last year I wrote in the newsletter: Why Value-based Fees? There are several books that talk about fixed fees versus hourly fees: Competing on Value, Value-Based Fees and Professional’s Guide to Value Pricing, just to name a few. If you can define your results rather than the tasks, you’re better off with a fixed fee. I came across an interesting blog entry recently, Things that make me crazy: The Mythical e-Learning Hour.
“Why do executives and managers who put development out for bid persist in focusing on what amounts to a measure of activity, not of results?”
I’m going to have to stay tuned to this authors rantings to see what develops.
I’ve been project managing, in various capacities, in various industries, for over 25 years. For most of that time, I was not a “certified” project manager. I did an excellent job, but had my share of shitty “lessons learned” meetings at project close-out. I didn’t get my PMP until 3 years ago…didn’t feel the need for it, fear of tests, didn’t want to study, blah, blah. I decided to take the exam because I wanted to see if I could do it, but, more importantly, I was about to present a seminar, to a dozen information technology nerds, on what PM was all about. I was afraid twenty years of experience wasn’t enough. I needed certification to impress my audience. I took the test.
It was a tough test, taxing my knowledge with questions on subjects I don’t use everyday. I answered all the questions in about two and a half hours and then spent another hour looking at my answers with a brain full of self-doubt. I passed the test.
Back then there were no exam-crams, no boot camps, no claims of guaranteed test-passing. I did look at the information provided by PMI, but experience was my only teacher. Now, magazine ads tout boot camps where I can spend 5 days and pass the test at the end of the week. I can find a multitude of books on “How to pass the PMP test” at the local book store with such titles as: PMP Certification For Dummies and PMP Exam Cram.
Not to say I wouldn’t have used these if they had been available, but my concern is: flooding the market with the “Paper PMP.” Any of you who are familiar with the IT industry may remember back a dozen years ago when the “Paper CNE” flooded the market or more recently the “Paper MCSE” has crashed a few networks. The only way to get ahead in the IT industry was to have certifications, and the industry responded by cranking out thousands of Paper [name your favorite technology here] Engineers.
Of course business owners, like myself, got tired of, or worse, burned by hiring these technology marvels because they couldn’t put any of their knowledge into practice. Boot camps or exam cramming books emphasized test preparation at the expense of practical knowledge. The “paper engineers” diluted the marketplace systematically. First it was the CNE (Certified Netware Engineer), then the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer), then a whole barrage of Cisco certifications. Each was at first the hot ticket and then fell off after an influx of test-passing-with-no-experience engineers.
With every new technology or endeavor, there have always been professionals who were self-taught, and many of them are the most intuitive and valuable employees. Unfortunately, some are overlooked or taken advantage of because their skills are not apparent on a resumé. I can see where this kind of person can benefit from a boot camp. Even if it is merely a test-preparation seminar, they are simply getting ready to prove what they can already apply.
Yes there is a lot of studying and learning required to be a proficient Project Manager, but the best learning I got was from the School of Hard Knocks (experience). And yes, I’m glad I got my PMP, but sad that someone with $5,000 and a week of free time can also. I just hope they get some hard knocks before managing a project.
Wow! I’m an artist. A major reason projects fail is that organizations typically think of project management as a science, not as an art, according to research from the Boston University Corporate Education Center. BUCEC Introduces Project Management Competency Model; Failure To Consider ”Art” Called Major Factor In Project Failure.
An in-depth article in CFO magazine about the Risks of Rogue Technology.
In IT parlance, “rogue technology” doesn’t suggest anything about deceitfulness or a lack of principles. In many cases the “rogues” are well-meaning employees who try to wring more productivity from fewer IT dollars but — because they’ve wandered from the path of the tried-and-true — haven’t paid sufficient attention to the security risks or additional costs. Perhaps without management’s knowledge, they bought a PDA with their own money and used it to access the network, or they set up a Wi-Fi “hot-spot” in a remote part of the corporate campus. Maybe they stored corporate data on a USB fob they got for free at a convention, or they used their camera-phone to take a few snapshots at work. Perhaps they used Yahoo or AOL to send an instant message to a colleague, a chat they didn’t realize would be vulnerable to interception since it occurred beyond the corporate firewall.
Do you have rogue tech in your organization? Better plug those leaks.
