Finding Your Project's Pulse

Michael Aucoin, D. Engr., PE, PMP is president of Leading Edge Management, LLC in College Station, Texas and author of Right-Brain Project Management: A Complementary Approach. He can be reached at [email protected].

  Agile  

Imagine for a moment that interest in your project catches on like crazy. Hundreds of people pitch in to help you meet an impossible deadline. At the last minute, tens of thousands of others join in to make the deliverable a memorable one.

Complete fantasy, right? It can happen, and it did. And the takeaways for your agile project are real--and powerful.

This Project Broke the Rules
To call this a project in the conventional sense is quite a stretch. There was no designated project manager, and no formal project organization. Those who led the effort had no training in project management. No one was paid for his or her time. There was no project plan, and the objective evolved gradually. Only within hours of the schedule deadline was the scope of the project communicated to a large number of participants.

In other words, this project violated just about every rule of conventional project management. It was an “accidental” project--and it was a phenomenal success.

A Last Minute Dramatic Vision
I live in the community where Texas A&M University is located. On the night of September 11, 2001, many wrestled with reacting to the tragic events of that day. One student put forward an idea to raise money for first responders in New York and to make a value statement. He suggested selling patriotic T-shirts for fans to wear at the next home …

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