Nine Project Management Fallacies

Hey, this is just like old times! I picked up on a great post via Jack Vinson, who picked up on it via Glenn Alleman. For all you social media types, this is how the world used to work. :)

The post is titled Nine Project Management Fallacies, and was written by Rick Brenner of Chaco Canyon Consulting. As Jack points out, what's really great about this post is that it highlights many of the human factors that come along with projects. For the record, Brenner's fallacies are:

• The Fallacy of Positivism
• The Bad Actor Fallacy
• The Naturalistic Fallacy
• The Culturalistic Fallacy
• The Fungibility Fallacy
• The Linearity Fallacy
• The Normative Fallacy
• The Availability Heuristic
• The Grandiosity Fallacy

My favourite: the Fungibility Fallacy:

" The Fungibility Fallacy holds that each person produces one hour of output in one hour, and that we can substitute people for one another. Terms that suggest this fallacy are man-month, headcount, and FTE.

Often, only a few people can perform certain tasks. Using the project management tools that distinguish the skills of large numbers of unique individuals takes time and effort, and even then they produce somewhat fictitious results.

And running "lean and mean" makes the problem worse. If you count the cost of delays and lost market windows due to overloading key people, running a little "fatter and kinder" might actually be more profitable."

Regardless of whether you're in the PMP fan club or not, if you enjoy seeing academic theory getting injected with a dose of humanity ... you'll probably enjoy this post.

Launch Day for Two Client Websites

Blogging has taken a back seat to work projects of late, but today marks the launch of a couple of great new websites for Stem clients. Read on, because there's an interesting story attached.

First we announced this morning a new law firm website for NGS Law - our family & divorce law client based in Arizona. This website was a great collaboration between the entire Stem team and the firm's managing partner Alexander Nirenstein. Alexander was a great client to work with - dream client status wouldn't be an overstatement. :) ... Everyone at Stem touched this website at some point, with Laurel Fulford (as usual) leading the way.

And then our second launch this morning - and another client based out of Arizona - Lawrence Koplow overhauled his principal website on AZ DUI defense - the Arizona DUI Center. Lawrence is one of our longest standing and best clients. Why best? Well, there's the story...

... When the opportunity came up to possibly work for NGS Law above, Lawrence recognized the firm name and that they were in his building. Better than any testimonial or referral, Lawrence went over and met with them. He must have said nice things, because we got the work. Above and beyond? You bet! Needless to say, we're not only happy with Lawrence as a client, but proud to associate with such a class act.

Our design portfolio is growing at Stem, slowly. It's not the type of work we tend to go after, at least on a piece work basis; but has been an extremely valuable addition for our retainer clients. We're looking to open that up in the future, but for now, I'd say we've got two solid examples of 'what we can do'.

They're certainly two projects (and clients) we're proud to be associated with.

Roundup of CALL Annual Reports

With the CALL conference coming this weekend, many of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are releasing their annual reports in preparation.

Michel-Adrien Sheppard at his Library Boy blog has rounded up links to each of them.

Quickscribe Manual Update for April 2010

There are two Quickscribe Manual updates for April: the BC Family Legislation Manual and the Provincial Court Family Legislation Manual. Daily updates to BC legislation are always available at www.bclegislation.ca.