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Showing posts with the label Project Management

Lessons Learned

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Howard Rosen, former president Alza's Corporation mentioned, "Part of anything innovative is that a lot of what you fail to do." Learning from mistakes and failures as well as multiplying good practices is an essential part of innovation activities and successful business environments. On a project level such learning is realized through formal lessons learned activities. The auditor should seek to determine the effectiveness of lessons learned activities when assessing projects and continuous improvement activities. Our checklist will help the auditor to find performance gaps and opportunities for improvement in Lessons Learned Processes. Download Lessons Learned Checklist Free presentations and documents on our Downloads page .

I’m moving.

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Which has me thinking about the process of moving. (Trust me: Thinking about the process of moving is infinitely more fun than the actual work of attacking and packing up that junked out storage closet.) So go with me here....    In a fundamental way, the act of selling your house, packing your stuff, finding a new place to live, moving your stuff, and unpacking your stuff so you can settle in and get back to your life again, well, it’s fundamentally just another project. It has mission and goals tied to overall strategy, and it has phases and methods and detailed tasks that must happen in a specific order. And just like any other project you might work on in your professional life, the process of pulling up sticks and moving your household will run more smoothly if you obey and organize around the principles of effective project management. Every project has specific phases. These are initiation, planning, implementing, controlling, and closing. If the project is long and...

Project Management vs Quality – How to Stop Making Each Other Crazy!

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Karen Creditor For quality professionals, interacting with project managers is undoubtedly the most frustrating part of their job. It’s not that project managers are bad people. In fact, I must confess that I am a project manager myself, and I have sometimes done my best work while making my quality colleagues crazy. For that I am truly sorry. Well, mostly sorry. Why are project managers so frustrating to quality professionals? I believe it’s because of the differences in world view. Concepts like value, frameworks, goals, and speed, along with the inherent differences in personality types drawn to each profession, make us view each other from slightly different perspectives. At our worst, we tend to look at each other like we live on different planets. Here’s an example I share with my students to illustrate the differences. Once upon a time I managed a team of project managers in a technology company. I had just hung up the phone from a planning call for the upcoming ISO audi...