Traveling on a Budget

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This is a topic with which I am wildly fascinated.  It’s no secret that I love to travel.  However, money is kind of important and doesn’t grow on trees.  So I have to be judicious about my personal travels.

A great friend sent me this article today on 25 secrets for traveling courtesy of some of the industry’s experts on cost-conscious travels.  It’s a great article with several links to other sites and areas to learn a wealth of further information about traveling on a budget.

Enjoy!

Til Next Time,

Michael

The Case Against: Comcast + TWC

I realize this is old news.  However, I was on vacation for a few days since then, and really needed some time to let the gravity of it all sink in.  I think this deal is absolutely horrible for the consumer.  I know I’m not alone in that sentiment (99.9% of consumers likely agree), so let me give some deeper perspective.

Here’s what I think will happen as a result of this joining of forces.  Papa Bear (Comcast) will:

  • Bring in Consulting Firm ABC* because they have “wealth of knowledge” of TWC infrastructure
  • Allow ABC to do 12-18 months of “current state analysis” to isolate gaps, dependencies, or similarities
  • Bite off on ABC’s recommendation to let ABC chew over the fundamental differences for another 18-24 months and conduct mass quantities of stakeholder interviews
  • Receive a proposal for how the new landscape should look and where the key integration points (people, process, technology, etc) are
  • Receive a (similar) proposal for the number of dollars it will take for ABC to “help along the way”
  • Altogether (~4 years later at this point) pay ungodly sums of money for implementation/integration of the companies to never come to fruition
  • Keep the companies operating as virtually-separate entities, with shared processes for minute activities where consolidation was a no-brainer
  • Pass on costs directly to consumers who will be handcuffed to Papa Bear’s services

In an upcoming post I plan to give a brief, humorous idea I have on how this Post-Merger-Integration could work better.  It’s 90% sarcasm, 10% truth.

Til Next Time,

Michael

*I have a feeling I know who firm ABC is too, and in my opinion: Uh Oh.

New York City

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Wanted to share a great article a friend forwarded me yesterday regarding New York.  Oh – by the way – it’s satire courtesy of the Onion and has lots of extreme foul language (par for the course – but adds a fantastic comedic effect in my opinion).  Still a tremendous set of prose and will resonate with any of you who have spent any time there.

Enjoy!

My own personal thoughts…  New York City is great.  In doses.  Lots of opportunity, tons of money, great sights, incredible food.  But – lots of cost, tons of trash, horrible weather, and people everywhere.  Literally, everywhere.

Til Next Time,

Michael

The Case Against: Traditional Project Management

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not have a PMP certification – so you may not think I’m the right guy to talk about this topic.  For that matter, I have no classical training in Project Management.  Sure, I have learned the ropes by living in a project management driven world since my beginnings back in college as a part-time custom software developer testing manager.  But I don’t have any certifications, degrees, or really any preferred methodology to tackle “project management”.

That being said, I have been around it enough to know that there is something about traditional project management that really bugs me.  Additionally, the concept that PMP certifications make someone a “better project manager” is farcical at best in my experiences.  Let me explain why.

Traditional project management, at its core, is not a bad thing.  It’s absolutely necessary, and delivering projects would be impossible without some form of ground rules or marching orders.  Effectively, the concept of project management is pretty simple and I believe very sound in its guiding principles (I’m taking some creative licensing with my concept of these principles, so don’t nail me if I’m overstating or miss a few):

  • Projects should have defined scope, schedule, and budget that the manager should monitor and report against
  • Projects should have a detailed work breakdown structure or project plan
  • Project plans should have clearly identified dependencies and the ability to discern critical path for project completion
  • Project managers should proactively and continually identify and mitigate risks according to a defined target date
  • Projects should engage all appropriate stakeholders (on internal teams as well as from boundary partners) and include them on project execution dialogue
  • Project managers should alert stakeholders of issues and organize the necessary parties to resolve any issues (i.e. risks that miss mitigation by deadlines)
  • Project reporting and communications should occur at defined intervals
  • Projects should have an executive steering committee and some form of governance to quickly and rationally work through any major decisions during the project lifecycle

And this all sounds great.  I don’t have an issue with it.  Where my proverbial beef comes in is when you dig a bit deeper into some of these principles.  The major risks (no pun intended) I see with these guidelines is that they can very easily lead to poor execution based upon the “hiccups” that happen.  For instance, just a few of the speed bumps that projects run into which are extremely difficult to navigate because traditional project management ignorantly expects only sunny day scenarios:

  • Scope, schedule, and budget are all forecasted at some point in time with only a minor portion of the information available; hence, it should be expected that these “forecasts” will prove wrong in at least one of the areas at some point in the project – and that shouldn’t be a bad thing (but too often is a major indictment to the manager or the whole team)
  • Dependencies are a beast and should never be reduced simply to a line in a project plan; as much as you plan for them – the fact is you are handcuffed to someone else, an external process, or something totally out of your control
  • Project plans, when managed diligently, leave project managers with no capacity to think about the “bigger picture”; the inability to step back and look at the plan from the outside often leads teams to continue towards “the plan” when in reality – the plan may very well need to change because of several factors (new business direction, corporate strategy differences, or updated market/financial dynamics)
  • Along the lines of scope/schedule/budget/status/project plans – people resent status monkeys; when you reduce the project manager to being a status monkey that is responsible for organizing a whole team’s worth of updates on individual project line items, you are not using that manager to their full potential (and are turning them into an administrator for electronic information aggregation – something these computers we have do quite well already without a human behind the keys)
  • Project reporting and communications get stale and people become numb to them; the real challenge is to define a cadence where everyone gets timely and pertinent information for them – the right people get the right information at the right time to act upon it
  • Most executive steering committees are not engaged in the right situations to earn their keep; executive steering is one of the most important components for any major project because at least once, you should expect to have to engage them for a very important decision (e.g. delaying a launch, limiting scope, requesting more budget)
  • Change Management is almost always afterthought for the “project team” (even in the projects where it is assumed/expected that Change Management will be executed by project personnel); the inability to proactively manage change implications and promote awareness across the whole corporation for major changes is an area where I see projects turn South far too often because the critical change functions are simply a line item in a thousand-line project plan
  • ^Speaking of, thousand-line project plans make projects too black-and-white; if everything is just a check box, how easy is it to just go off into a dark room and check the box?  (answer: way too easy, and the results usually reflect the quality you’d expect by someone doing something just to check a box)

I’ll put it a different way…  You’ve probably heard it before: everything that can go wrong will go wrong.  I’m not trying to keep this post overly pessimistic, but it amazes me when I so often see managers encounter a road block and get paralyzed by their inability to react to the situation.  It’s almost as if they didn’t see it coming.

Maybe I’m jaded.  Maybe I have been on too many projects that weren’t set up for success from the start.  There’s one thing I have observed over time though – great managers aren’t great managers because they deliver in good times.  When the going’s good, everyone’s an all star.  Rather, they’re good managers because they manage the hell out of difficult times.  And, if you don’t expect that some things can (and will) go wrong, you are less likely to be able to course correct, employ contingency plans, or dig out of the ditch.

I don’t have anything empirically against the PMP types and traditional project management.  I just feel like they are touted a bit too much as being some form of end-all be-all.  It’s about time we revisited project management excellence and realized that we should probably develop a specialized construct for each situation (given the corporate landscape, project complexity, amount of time/energy available from resources) in order to prepare for project delivery success.  I have always hated trying to put a “one size fits all” approach on to any situation*.  It’s not fair to anyone involved and is blatantly ignorant to the uniqueness and intricacies that will always be present from project to project.  We are living in a digital/social age.  People will tell you immediately what they had for lunch on Facebook.  Why can’t we turn that active engagement into something useful to help with project delivery?  Maybe it’s better collaboration tools, maybe it’s gamification of project delivery – I don’t know.  But we need to make a change.

*On that note, I promise a “Case Against” post soon for stock methodologies, generic templates, and “reusable” processes.  I’m sure you can guess my opinion.

Til Next Time,

Michael

50 Posts!

Thank you all for following along.  This marks my 50th post since I set out on this journey.  The positive feedback and praise you have given (in addition, of course, to the equally-appreciated constructive criticism and challenges to my thoughts) has been nothing short of fantastic.  Stay tuned for more and I promise I will continue to share as much of my journey as I can!

Til Next Time,

Michael

Regrettable Majors

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I’ll spare you the reminder on why I think choosing your college major is extremely important and not something that should be done on a whim…  But I did want to share this article from Monster I saw a few weeks back on the top 5 most regretted majors (based upon graduates’ perception as well as initial salary).  I think we all owe it to ourselves and society to start to drive some more actionable dialogue with our nation’s youth around what their academic career typically means long term from an income earning potential perspective.

http://career-advice.monster.com/salary-benefits/salary-information/top-5-most-regretted-majors/article.aspx

Til Next Time,

Michael

Getting Fit

I know I have already harked a lot on dressing for success and outward appearance as a means to minimize your risk of people not taking you seriously – but felt compelled to kick off this Monday with a quick post about fitness.

Being fit and living a healthy lifestyle obviously has its health benefits.  But even more, the psychological and work-appearance benefits are huge as well.  It is my opinion that there is zero excuse not to be fit (or at least as fit as your body type allows for you to be).  It’s a shame when I see obese people being wheeled through the airport because they simply do not care enough to dig themselves out of the massive (pun intended) hole they have built for themselves by opting for fried chicken instead of the treadmill one (read: hundreds) too many times.

I understand there are many diseases and conditions (e.g. thyroid problems) which cause people to not be able to maintain normal weights.  And this post is in no way directed at those individuals.  It’s for the people who show up to the office bursting at the seams and in no way exude any sort of professional presence because they claim to “not have time” to get to the gym.  That answer has been and always will be BS to me.  Stop being lazy or reprioritize some of your existing agenda in order to get some sort of physical activity in 3 to 5 times a week.  Your nightly date with the “Family Guy” reruns on local television don’t count either.

For the rest of us that (at least try to) stay in shape – we need to be better about policing this throughout our work environment.  We should organize “Biggest Loser” competitions, support charities/fundraisers to fitness, and contact our healthcare providers to maximize the benefits we may have already with them through their wellness programs.  Or at a minimum, next time we work late and have to cater food in, let’s try not to choose the China Express Delivery option.  After all, we are all powerless over Kung Pao Chicken and Fried Rice…

Just my little rant to kick off the week 🙂

Til Next Time,

Michael