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Who's Best? And How To Survive Without Either On Your Payroll… Driving home, listening to the radio the other day, the Shangri-Las came on with their classic hit "Leader Of The Pack". It jumped out at me, not least because of the noisy motorbike sound effects but also because I had been contemplatin...

Previously published on CIO.com A great BA is worth their weight in gold, here’s why…… The IT business analyst role has traditionally been one that facilitates communication between IT and business stakeholders. Subsequently, business analysts have always had great skills in this area, adept at both...

"You're so passionate about Project Management, you should write a blog about it," one of my colleagues said a couple of years back. That's how it started. I wrote one blog and then, having found it quite enjoyable, I wrote a second and then a third. I got some nice feedback, got shared, had a clien...

Need an alternative to IT project apps?  The Project Management app market seems to be saturated, each promising that theirs is the definitive solution. It's like diets and self-help books! If each is so great why do we need so many? It does make choosing the right one very hard. Of course, no two I...

I have come to a conclusion this week ... most IT Project challenges are not solved by theoretical, intelligent design. Now, I make a living delivering project success through proper planning, processes, governance, etc. ... in other words theoretical, intelligent design - so let me explain what I m...

Project Managers need to strategically upskill to deliver the business value needed in the future. This is the key take home from a survey from AXELOS ahead their Summer reboot of PRINCE2. "Organisations will demand greater business awareness from project managers in the next few years. As a result,...

Originally published on CIO.com When I asked associates, acquaintances and clients (who had all recently recruited for IT roles) how many had used personality type or psychometric testing, 7 out of 10 said that they had. I recall the response from a survey by the Society for Human Resource Managemen...

After a successful Bank Holiday building flat pack furniture, I decided that I would get proactive on all the other little jobs around the house. You know the ones. The loose this, the broken that, the "in need of oiling" the other. They're the jobs that are mentally scheduled for completion "at som...

It makes sense doesn't it? Which exercise DVD are you going to buy? The one that features 50 different gruelling exercises or the one that promises you'll drop a dress size in a week? Harvard Business School professor, Theodore Levitt, once put this beautifully, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-i...

When considering outsourcing, how can you ensure you get the best deal and optimise your operations? Ask the following four simple questions of any IT/vendor/outsourcing relationship that you are about to enter into and you can assess how suited to your brief that action path is. 1 - Has the sharp s...

There was a time when collaborations between music artists were a rarity. Queen and David Bowie, George Michael and Aretha Franklin, Lionel Richie and Diana Ross ... they stood out. It was quite exciting when your favourite artist teamed up with someone else because the outcome was always something ...

"Have you ever wondered why over half of IT Projects fail?" said the voice on the other end of the phone. The cold caller hadn't ingratiated himself by calling me "Dave". I'm David. It's not that I mind "Dave". It's just not my name. Quite an assumption too, I mean, I wonder if he'd open a call to s...

As I write this we have just entered the second quarter of 2017, Spring is looming, the daffodils are blooming and the year is zooming by. I don't know about you, but my thoughts have already started to turn to the summer and specifically the annual family holiday - our chance to relax, unwind and c...

"It's a poor workman who blames his tools." I heard this, for the first time in years, during the analysis of why an IT Project had failed to deliver. It got me thinking. Is it true? Is Project success more a product of the skills of a project team than the tools that they use? Or is it the case tha...

In recent weeks, I've observed that there seem to be three ways of communicating 'news' in IT Projects. i) To communicate the news, update or information half as big as it is in reality. ii) To communicate the news, update or information twice as big as it is in reality. iii) To communicate the news...