Volume IX - Issue XI - November 2007
Featured Papers
Churchill Stiffens Resolve By Mark Kozak-Holland Most people are very familiar with Winston Churchill but may not be familiar with his “agile” approach to project management and his skills as a project manager (PM) in the summer of 1940. Part 14 looked at how Churchill personally communicated using both verbal and non-verbal communication to fight the mood of defeatism, build confidence, and get buy in into his plan. This article, with an invasion imminent, discusses how he stiffened resolve, took the offense with decisive action, and focused on the moral dimension of events. This was very pertinent to Churchill’s long term strategy. In today’s world the PM is the principal representative of the project. In many projects after the euphoria of the kickoff meeting there comes a point where reality sets in, and so does the enormity of the task for the project team members. Confidence may start to wane and a wobble factor may creep in. The role of the PM is to act courageously to shift the mood and includes managing the projects emotional well-being. One of Churchill’s long term objectives (Part 10) was to get the U.S. into an alliance with the U.K and eventually involved in the war. He sent telegrams to President Roosevelt asking for support, outlining the perilous situation . He also sent telegrams to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King to enlist his support and impress Churchill’s case to Roosevelt. Churchill recognized the problem that Roosevelt (pictured below) had in supporting the U.K. publicly, with the U.S. staunchly neutral, although in private he encouraged Churchill.
Why Agile Popped Up on the Radar When it Did By Bas De Baar In the first half of the nineties, I was studying Business Informatics at Vrije Universtiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As a final exam, I performed field research at a large financial institution. The department in which my study took place was a pool of Project Managers, both novice and experienced alike. The projects they performed suffered from what they called “interventions”, which were changes triggered by the project environment. Being educated as a plan-driven-pro, I set out my checklist and searched for forgotten process components, only to find out after a couple of months that everything was neatly in place. From standard documents to procedures, they had it all. And still the project went from left to right. Being the eager beaver that I was, I just kept on looking and looking for the missing ingredient but could not find a single clue to locating the feature or process that would help to solve the pressing problem. At one given moment, I had an “aha”-accident (a hit on the head), which turned out to be a life altering moment professionally. At the coffee corner, I overheard fellow project team members have a conversation about a procedure that they were not going to follow… My jaw dropped. Not following the official procedure? Not complying with company policies? If they didn't follow procedure then all the changes implemented were going to be completed without the project manager’s knowledge… clonk. The penny dropped. It seems so simple now, but it really rocked my world at the time.
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