I had a nightmare last night. I was reliving a workshop that I took during a prior job. I think the nightmare was triggered by a box of material I found in a storage area that contained documents from that job. I noticed the box was labeled "The Dark Years."I was a participant in a three day workshop. Each of the participants was a … [Read more...]
Measure ROTI
How can you quickly measure the Return on Time Invested (ROTI) by the participants of a meeting? Have the participants rate their personal ROTI during the meeting using the following scale: 4. Superb: I learned something that will save me significant time. 3. Positive: I learned something that will save me time. 2. Balanced: I broke … [Read more...]
Influencing Management
In response to my post entitled Check the Box where I suggest that you choose not to argue with your manager about doing a task whose primary purpose is the furtherance of a PR campaign with their manager, my colleague Bob Lee writes "How much Fantasy Experienced As Reality is building up above?" It depends on your point of view, Bob. For Susan, … [Read more...]
Check the Box
How many times do you complete a task that you don't believe in just so that you can tell your manager it's complete? Susan was asked by Jerry, her manager, to do a knowledge transfer to her geographically dispersed teammates about a recent internal meeting at HQ. The internal meeting had been the typical three day death by Powerpoint … [Read more...]
Sales Project Management
I manage projects as an engineer. There are other people in my office that are sales people. They manage projects much differently. Truly managing a project as an engineer requires identifying risks. That assessment isn't for the faint of heart. You must find things that could go wrong. Sales people are often distressed by this search. One sales … [Read more...]