I do not know about you, but every once in a while when I think about all of the different causes I could join I start feeling overwhelmed. We have so much to do for our planet, our creatures and our people. Where do I start? Where do I place my focus? How can I make a difference? Then I remember this quote, a quote I love and use:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever…

You may have heard the saying, “charity begins at home”. The idea is that before you take care of others you take care of those who are closest to you first. Don’t give away your last dime if you have no money to feed your own family, don’t give away your time and energy to others if your own family is waiting at home for your time and energy. Today I would like to propose to you an updated version of this expression, one for our professional lives – “charity begins at work.”

There…

Traditional IT project management has grown up around and closely aligned with the Waterfall software development methodology. As with most engineering projects the final product to be delivered is scoped, designed, built, tested and implemented – in that order. This is OK if the client knows what it needs precisely and the number of changes is relatively small. Waterfall falls down (pardon the pun) if the project is a quest to achieve an objective and everything changes…

Not everything in IT needs to be a project – by de-projectizing maintenance work major improvements in delivery are possible.

In particular, the ‘Scrum’ variant of Agile offer the interesting option to de-projectize a lot of IT maintenance work in much the same way a large amount of physical maintenance work is undertaken by a team of ‘maintainers’ working through a backlog of prioritized issues. Where an IT shop uses stable teams, ‘scrum’ to plan work on a monthly basis and ‘sprints’…

Sometimes you find yourself working with someone and no matter how kind and compassionate you try to be, you still think they are a jerk. Maybe they yell all the time or they are condescending or a back stabber. It might be tempting to yell at them more loudly than they yelled at you or to answer them with sarcasm or to plot your revenge.

Don’t do it! You don’t want to answer jerkiness with jerkiness. Sure, it feels great – at first. You sure got them right? You really showed…

by Dr. Andrew Makar

Project managers are often put in the challenging position of having the responsibility for a project but limited authority over the people actually working on that project.  Can’t you just imagine a world where all of the project teams would work with the efficiency of the orange-faced Oompa-Loompas from …