Many Project Management Professional (PMP)® students have trouble understanding the difference between a planning package and a work package. Let’s turn first to A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) to clear up any confusion: Planning Package = A work breakdown structure component below the control account with known work contentRead… Read more »
Internships are time-honored ways to get your foot in the door at an organization you’d love to work for – but you’re only going to get out of it what you put in. Whether you’re a student doing an internship for credit, or a professional who’s exploring a different career option, here are some concreteRead… Read more »
My post on engagement from a few weeks ago, The Myth of Social Media Engagement in the Public Service, generated a healthy debate on the nature and inherent value of engagement in the public sector. Some interpreted my post as saying that I held little or no value in engagement for the public sector. ThisRead… Read more »
I have always been interested in happiness. Even before Pharrell Williams made it fashionable to sing about and dance to, I was interested in what made people happy. When I was given the opportunity to do some research for a Masters degree in Public Leadership (Virginia State Univ 2013) citizen satisfaction with local government becameRead… Read more »
In my last blog, I talked about how to increase everyone’s productivity by tweaking your meetings. What about making your personal time more productive? Technology helps you multitask and do more, right? Wrong. Mutitasking creates lower quality results making you less productive. Here are seven productivity tips that I have combined from inc.com, a listRead… Read more »
A fascinating paper by Winograd and Hais, and published by the Brookings Institution this morning, discusses some striking differences in what appeals to Millenials, compared to earlier birth cohorts, and it got me thinking. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/05/millenials-upend-wall-street-corporate-america-winograd-hais The authors’ focus is principally on the corporate side of things, and consumer behaviour, discussing what they believe is aRead… Read more »
“‘Are people innately altruistic?’ is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives.” – Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner (SuperFreakonomics) One of the most important things an open data directive can accomplish – whether it takes the form an informal policy, an executive order or an open dataRead… Read more »
I was struck last month by a story I read in The New York Times. The Prime Minister of South Korea announced he was stepping down after 302 lives were lost in a ferry disaster. In that article, Prime Minister Chung Hong-won is quoted saying “when I saw the people’s sadness and fury, I thoughtRead… Read more »
I will present my Lean Scope Project Management methodology on Wednesday to the Project Management Institute’s Government Community of Practice. On Thursday, I will release a YouTube video explaining Lean Scope Project Management. I look forward to the comments of project management practitioners and human-centered design practitioners. The origin story of Lean Scope Project ManagementRead… Read more »
This post originally appeared on cpsrenewal.ca. Last year Nick and I went down a long rabbit hole on the idea of the faceless bureaucrat (see: Embracing Authenticity Means Embracing Complexity). There’s a maxim that bureaucrats are rightly anonymous, in that it facilitates professional, non-partisan advice, but I’ve been wondering if the foundations on which thatRead… Read more »