Month: November 2010

Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Metrics, Planning, Teams

Agile Project Wins PMI Award

This was a regional competition, not the national one, but I am really pleased to report that the IPS project I managed for the last 3+ years won the PMI-SAC Business & IT “Project of the Year” award at last week’s PMI Gala and Conference. The Integrated Pipeline Solution (IPS) manages about a third of Canada’s heavy oil transportation. While you may think tracking oil moving through a pipeline sounds pretty simple, like anything, the devil is in the details. Husky has about 30,000km of pipeline and complications such as blending products, forecasting production, optimizing capacity, custody transfers, billing, accruals, etc and the fact that billions of dollars are at stake mean that the rules, regulations and complexity adds up […]

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Agile Project Management, Leadership, Planning, Teams

Aligning PMOs using Game Theory

Does your PMO Produce Multiple Obstacles for your project or Promote Many Opportunities for success? A Project Management Office (PMO) can act as an obstacle to agile projects. This can take the form of asking for inappropriate planning detail by not recognizing the likelihood of changes; or asking for conformance to templates that are not even used on an agile project. For these reasons PMOs often get a bad reputation on agile teams, but it need not be that way, they can also add tremendous support and be a great help. First let’s look at what a PMO actually does (or what they should do, since implementations and services vary). In the September 2010 issue of the Project Management Journal […]

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Agile Project Management, Books

PMBOK Guide: Highway Code or Highway Map?

Most people studied the Highway Code before taking their drivers licence exam. They had to learn (enough of) it to pass the exam, but then most likely did not reference it again, except until helping a friend study for the exam. Maps on the other hand, in printed paper form, or digital like GPS, are referenced much more frequently. Maps help us plan, track progress, and get to our destinations and we refer to them often when travelling anywhere new. So, is the PMBOK Guide like the Highway Code or a map? Do we only read it to pass our PMP exam and then it gathers dust, maybe picked up again to lend to a friend? I think for many […]

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