Clarrus

All Shapes and Sizes

Jim Brosseau — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:41:54 +0000

I spent a few years facilitating an award winning PM Certificate program in Vancouver, up to about a year ago. One of the things that astounded me in that program (and I’m sure the scenario plays out elsewhere as well) is that on the first day, most of the students were looking for a standard [...]

An Outside Perspective

Jim Brosseau — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:13:02 +0000

In a consulting role for the past 12 years, I’ve worked with organizations from an outside perspective. Whether mentoring project teams in an academic environment, performing due diligence for a venture capital firm, or facilitating key team discussions, the value that I bring from the outside is something that is difficult to replace. Here’s my [...]

Reductio ad Absurdum

Jim Brosseau — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:27:39 +0000

I got a note recently from someone halfway across the world, asking about a detail in my white paper about quantifying the quality requirements of a system. The query me ponder for a moment before I came up with a reasonable response, but I think it highlighted something that applies in a broader sense as [...]

Working the Fundamentals

Jim Brosseau — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:31:58 +0000

With all the time we have watching our kids in their activities this fall, a pattern begins to emerge. All of these activities involve practice and drills intended to improve proficiency in fundamentals of each activity: dribbling and passing in soccer and basketball, scales and chord progressions in guitar, footwork drills and off-ice practice in [...]

Deadlines and Commitments

Jim Brosseau — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:29:51 +0000

While some projects absolutely must be high quality, and others might be physically constrained by size, there is one dimension that is clearly the most prominent point of discussion on projects of all shapes and sizes: When must it be finished? Deadlines are the lifeblood (or scourge, depending on your perspective) of project commitments. The [...]

Expertise vs. Teamwork

Jim Brosseau — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:15:32 +0000

We were working through a project management workshop that I have blogged about in the past, where we have a fun blend of theory and practice centred around a brief construction project. With more than enough resources to go around, we decided to try to design an experiment for the last round that might help [...]

Evolving Perspectives

Jim Brosseau — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:28:38 +0000

It seems that at any point in time, the current beliefs we hold to be true are sacrosanct. We are entirely convinced that we are correct as we use these beliefs to guide our way through life. It also seems that if we look back in time, whether that is 50 years ago, twenty years [...]

From Training to Education

Jim Brosseau — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:24:32 +0000

It is interesting to see what happens at some point in almost every workshop I run. Just after talking about some topic, often a topic where I get up on a soapbox and go off on a rant that takes us well beyond the standard training fare, I’ll have a few people come up to [...]

Certification vs. Education

Jim Brosseau — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:27:56 +0000

Way back in 1939, the great and powerful Oz had this to say to the Scarecrow, who was in search of a brain: “Why, anybody can have a brain, that’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pucilanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, [...]

Best Intentions

Jim Brosseau — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:51:31 +0000

We’ve all been in situations where we find ourselves slogging through our work, and the focus (if there is any focus at all) is to get the work done, rather than get it done well. Certainly household chores can fall into that category, and around the office there are similar activities like month-end reporting that [...]