Living in a Glasshouse

As a senior program/project manager I spend most of my professional career in international program/project management, focusing on distributed projects in multi-cultural environments. People I work with recognize me for my ability to assess a situation quickly and define adequate and pragmatic actions to bring projects back on track. My style of management can be characterized as can-do, a pragmatic approach focusing on delivery.

 

After a long and sometimes stressful period, we achieved to have a global track & trace in production on the internet. The application not only provided information where the goods were in the past but also predicted the date they would arrive at their destination. The application is visited roughly five times a second around the clock.

Looking back at this period, it became apparent that there is a distinction between development and implementation of internal information systems and systems available on the internet. One of the major differences is the transparency to the whole world. You truly live in a glasshouse. The users are the customers of your company and they all have their own motivation and reasoning to have certain information in a certain format at a certain time.

Below you find three major differences I discovered during the period I was responsible (as project manager) for developing and implementing internet-based applications for a truly global company. Keeping these principles in mind helped me to deliver internet applications on time and within budget. Here are three principles for managing e-projects:

Prefer small, complete deliveries over incomplete

Ideas to use the internet to brand and market the company are new and fresh, and there is often no benchmark. Also, ideas are often a reaction to what a…

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