• Making meetings work for you and your project

    Making meetings work for you and your project

      I can remember very clearly the worst meeting I was ever involved in. A “flagship” municipal project with the potential to bring world admiration to a city. This new project needed new IT systems. So 44 of us sat in a room together — architects, engineers, program and project managers, business analysts, change managers,…

  • Thank VUCA for project management!

    Thank VUCA for project management!

    With the end of the Cold War in the 1990s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the post-World War II order had crumbled and we found ourselves in a new multi-polar world. To characterise this new state of affairs, the U.S. military developed the term VUCA, standing for the four conditions of Volatility, Uncertainty,…

  • Flexing your agile muscle as a program and project manager

    Flexing your agile muscle as a program and project manager

    One of the great, and largely unnoticed, innovations of the 21st century has been the advent of agile working. Flexible workplaces and flexible working have been with us for a while, but now these have been replaced by agile workplaces and agile working. Whereas flexible working was seen as a business “perk,” agile is seen…

  • An interview with Mark McGowan, WA Premier, on the importance of Project Management

    An interview with Mark McGowan, WA Premier, on the importance of Project Management

      What is your understanding of the term “project management”? As Premier, I recognise the importance of best practise procurement as part of good project management, and as such I am focused on achieving value for money for the taxpayer as part of any project and ensuring we create local jobs and use local content…

  • The Age of Agile

    The Age of Agile

    There have been such events before. Events so profound that they shape all society in ways inconceivable to their originators. Will the agile movement have such a profound effect? Will it be seen as revolutionary as James Hargreaves’ invention of the spinning jenny, or as revolutionary as George Stephenson’s first locomotive? Indeed, will we come…

  • Innovation in project management: Can it be done?

    Innovation in project management: Can it be done?

    Successful businesses today focus time and energy on innovation, on pushing employees to try new and different ways of working. That got me thinking — how can we innovate in project management? Innovating in IT hardware is relatively common: Look at the success of ARM or the general agreement that surrounds Moore’s Law. Even innovation in…