The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management

Negative Reinforcement Threats are an imperfect way to motivate performance. No matter how serious the threat, the work still won’t get done on time if the time originally allocated for it was not sufficient. Worse still, if the target doesn’t get met, you may actually have to make good on your threats.

The manager has to learn to trust her gut, lead from the heart and build soul into the team and into the organization.”

But the real world requires close, warm and almost intimate interconnections between team members, and easy, effective interaction through the whole organization.” “So how do you make that happen?” “Well, you don’t make it happen at all. You let it happen. You create an atmosphere where it can happen. And then, if you’re lucky, it does happen.”

She certainly will. But we’ll ask her, as a favor, to do her growing on the next project. We’ll ask her to do one time for us what she has successfully done before for others. We’ll do that for each project, ask people to defer for a bit the chance to take on a real stretch goal, and repeat, just one time, what they already know they can do success

Process and Process Improvement Good process and continually improving process are admirable goals. They are also very natural goals: good technical workers will focus on them whether you tell them to or not. Formal process improvement programs costs time and money: a given process improvement effort may well set project work back. Even if producti

Pathological Politics (Again) You can’t expect to cure pathology from beneath. Don’t waste your time or jeopardize your position by trying. Sometimes your only option is to bide your time, waiting for the problem to resolve itself, or for a good opportunity for you to move on.

Low level design is the only thing that is real. The other, the so-called ‘conceptual design,’ is just for show.”

So bad news that everybody wants to tell and every good boss wants to know never gets through until it’s too late. I bet the ANON id is practically never used at all. But when it is, it will be invaluable.

You can’t get people to do anything different without caring for them and about them. To get them to change, you have to understand (appreciate) where they’re coming from and why.