Guerrilla Project Management

The Eight Constants of Change – An Interview with Stacy Aaron

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:48:25 +0000

Listen now: Right click here to download the MP3 In this edition of the Guerrilla Project Management podcast, I interview Stacy Aaron co-author of two books on organizational change: The Change Management Pocket Guide published in 2005 and The Eight Constants of Change published in 2008. These books are popular with many Fortune 500 companies such as, American [...]

Global System Rollouts – Focus on Latin America

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:39:24 +0000

Listen now: Right click here to download the MP3 In this edition of the Guerrilla Project Management podcast, I interview Nicolas Sulla on large global rollouts. I attended Nicolas’s presentation on this topic and invited him to share with us his experience from a global rollout of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) in Latin America. Nicolas is a global Project [...]

On Wearing Two Hats: Project Manager and Product owner

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:37:45 +0000

A healthy conflict between the Project Manager and the Product Owner creates a build-in system of checks and balances that protect projects from getting hijacked by single-minded agendas. In our experience, when these two roles are performed by a single person, that individual is likely to be much stronger in one area than the other. It [...]

Tips for Effective Statements of Work

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:27:06 +0000

The current economy is forcing vendors to re-organize, cut staff, and re-think their strategies and business models. These changes often have the potential to impact the commitments they have already made to their clients and customers. How will you make sure that your project is not affected by such changes? In the case of a conflict or [...]

Tailoring Agile Practices for Enterprise System Integration Projects – Part 2

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:17:46 +0000

In my previous posts, Agile Practices in Large System Integration Projects and Tailoring Agile Practices for Enterprise System Integration Projects – Part 1, I argued that we need ways to incorporate Agile in system integration projects without (a) changing the entire organization or (b) waiting for the organization to change. We also need to tailor [...]

Tailoring Agile Practices for Enterprise System Integration Projects – Part 1

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 05:04:38 +0000

In my previous post, Agile Practices in Large System Integration Projects, I argued that some Agile practices are not easy to implement in enterprise system integration projects without tailoring. In this series of posts, I will identify a set of key Agile practices that offer the greatest value and recommend ways to tailor them to fit [...]

Don’t get caught between your Vendor and a Hard Place

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Wed, 26 May 2010 06:25:49 +0000

The reputations of many great project managers were ruined because their projects failed due to their mismanagement of vendors. The biggest mistake project managers make in discerning the status of their project is to rely solely on vendor status reports. These reports give only one version of the project’s progress. And that version happens to be [...]

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:06:58 +0000

Sometimes, to break an impasse on your project you may need to say you are sorry, whether you are right or not and whether the other person is right or not. This is hard. Saying “I’m sorry” is hard because it challenges our natural need to protect ourselves. Our ego has been engineered to protect us. Its [...]

What I know for sure

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:01:50 +0000

A project manager asked this question on askaboutprojects.com: “I am a new project manager working on my first project as project manager. Can someone please share the examples of challenges they faced in projects” I gave the following advice before and I think it is appropriate for this question: The biggest challenge you will face in transitioning to [...]

Agile Practices in Large System Integration Projects

samad@guerrillaprojectmanagement.com (Samad Aidane) — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:17:55 +0000

The reality of organizations is that they don’t come in a very neatly packaged configuration to which we can apply a single project management methodology. I spoke a couple weeks ago at an Oracle users group conference about my experience applying Agile practices in a large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) upgrade project. From discussions with project [...]