Tag Archives: Mark Moore

#67 – REDUCING RISK BY FAILING FASTER – MARK MOORE

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Mark Moore

Once upon a time, a wise corporate trainer devised an exercise for a class on agile principles.  As you might know, reducing risk by “failing faster” is a core principle of any agile method … but that’s getting ahead of my story.

The exercise was pretty simple in nature – take 25 pennies, flip them heads-up/tails-up/heads-up in succession and make sure they ended up in date order with Mr. Lincoln facing the same way.  There were a couple of other rules designed to leverage lean principles and the goal was to progressively beat the time it took to complete the exercise over the course of three iterations of the tasks. Continue reading →

#56 – FORGET ABOUT THE MULE – LOAD THE WAGON – MARK MOORE

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Mark MooreI have a colleague who uses the title as one of his social media tag lines.  It always made me laugh – but it also causes me to let out a heavy sigh.  I’ve seen it far more as reality in running projects than I have as just an amusing tagline.

Projects usually take one of two tracks.  If they are planned well and managed closely, they generally run well and, while there are surprises, the project manager and the project sponsor/leadership get the results they wanted and are reasonably happy with them.  Then, of course, there are projects on the opposite end of the spectrum – the ones that make every project manager cringe when the e-mail or IM comes in from the sponsor.  These are the projects that were overloaded from the start in one way or another.  If you haven’t seen one as a PM, you probably haven’t been managing long enough yet. Continue reading →

#42 – MR. TOAD’S WILD RIDE (A LESSON IN STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT) – MARK MOORE

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Mark MooreThe classic book The Wind in the Willows was a bit of a difficult read for me in my younger years.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually finish it.  I recall it got kind of bogged down and philosophical and that really didn’t appeal to me as a pre-teen.  So I put it back on the shelf and went on to something more action-packed.  I didn’t think about it until recently when my manager brought it up … most specifically the part that Disney leveraged to create the title ride for this article. Continue reading →

#41 – WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW COULD KILL – YOUR PROJECT – MARK MOORE

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Mark MooreI’m going to leverage one more story about my daughter, because it clearly illustrates a problem my wife and I could have avoided had we not been so intent at placing our own interpretation and ‘knowledge’ on the situation.

She must have been about two when this started.  She’d come to us a little frightened and start to explain what was bothering her.  She kept repeating the word ‘because’ and we naturally asked, ‘Because what?’  The short version is that my wife finally figured out she was saying ‘big claws’ and this was a result of some nightmare.  It wasn’t the two of us who did the deducing … instead my daughter (obviously frustrated with her idiot parents) used a different word.  She said ‘fingernails’ instead … and the barrier was broken. Continue reading →

#39 – TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE – THE INTENTIONAL KIND – MARK MOORE

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Mark MooreI’m recalling a memory of a rather stubborn little girl who was set on doing things her own way.  She wouldn’t walk in public until around 15 months, presumably because she didn’t want to look foolish to herself or anyone else.  A little later, she developed this habit of turning her head and closing her eyes when she didn’t want to hear what was being told to her.  To this day, she still likes to figure things out for herself – all on her own terms. Continue reading →