David Ramthun

Project Blind Spots

David Ramthun — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:38:12 +0000

It’s morning, you are late for work, you grab your coffee and hop in the car to get on your way. You check the rear-view mirror to make sure nothing is behind you. You also check the side mirrors to make sure both sides are clear. You begin backing out of the garage or driveway [...]

My brief hiatus

David Ramthun — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:22:51 +0000

I just wanted to send a quick update for the lack of posts since May. Things have been quite busy for me and does not look to be letting up until August. I guess this is a good thing.In any case, I will be resuming posts next week starting with some “lessons learned” experiences on [...]

Project management in a virtual organization

David Ramthun — Sat, 29 May 2010 03:41:33 +0000

As more companies are taking on green initiatives, many are looking to reduce their carbon footprint. In most cases, this means having less office space and computer systems to power. With the shrinking real estate for these companies, the employees need to have a place to call home when they are at work. For some [...]

Project Management Words to Live By

David Ramthun — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:25:38 +0000

In Project Management, we have a number of sayings that hold true to form and others that are just funny, but true. See, in our world, things don’t always go as planned (SURPRISE!), so it is our duty to warn others of things to watch out for as well as providing good advice. I will [...]

Project Management Lessons from Charlie Brown

David Ramthun — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:54:40 +0000

I happened to catch a Charlie Brown episode on TV the other day. It was one of those with Charlie Brown and Lucy playing baseball. As it always happens, Lucy had a fly ball coming to her and she missed it. Charlie Brown later asked her what happened. Her reply; “I had missed so many [...]

Project Management and Agile-Scrum

David Ramthun — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:12:14 +0000

IT project managers are often tasked with a number of tasks when it comes to managing projects. We lead projects in infrastructure design and build, desktop upgrades, software upgrades, and software development. Under traditional project management, we have different project methodologies that can be used depending on the type of project being handed to us. [...]

Turn a project #FAIL into #SUCCESS

David Ramthun — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:34:14 +0000

How many of us have been handed a project that was failing with the expectation that we do whatever it takes to turn it around? Having been thrown into the lion’s den on a number of occasions, I understand the pressure. What I want to do in this post is simply outline my thoughts on [...]

Goals of a project manager

David Ramthun — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:58:42 +0000

Jason Westland wrote a guest article over on IT Business Edge where he laid out the 5 goals of a project manager. In it he defined the following as the primary goals for any project manager: Finish on time Finish under budget Meet the requirements Keep customers happy Ensure a happy team He details the [...]

Be a leader of IT Professionals

David Ramthun — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:05:02 +0000

James Callaghan once said “A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice.” Now, while this is accurate for most, leaders of IT professionals know that there are certain facts that should not be eroded if they wish to achieve maximum performance from their IT teams. IT Professionals have the patience of [...]

Social Project Management

David Ramthun — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:33:25 +0000

As project managers, we are all very aware of the need to communicate to our project teams as well as our stakeholders. The basic formula for calculating possible communication channels is N(N-1)/2, where N is the number of stakeholders and/or project members. For all intents and purposes, project members are stakeholders as well, so stakeholders [...]