Managing Internal Risk
Situation: You've been making a lot of decisions on the fly lately... I read this cover story a couple of days ago on a plane - "Why We Worry About the Wrong Things, The Psychology of Risk." by Jeffrey Kluger. Even though it's really about the personal, sort of everyday risks that we all take, I thought it was particularly relevant to what we as Project Managers do for a living.The author talks about the following reasons for our natural mis-perception of risks, saying: - our pre-historic brains are pre-programmed to have fight or flight reactions to certain stimuli.(when we intuitively feel threatened, we react) - we naturally are troubled more by the prospect of pain and suffering than even death. The closer in time we are to the unfortunate event, the more motivated we are to react. - we fool ourselves into thinking we are less likely to suffer a bad outcome if we are in control (driving a car vs. being a passenger on a plane) - we need to be particularly skeptical of statistics, as they can be rigged to say anything. He concludes the piece by recommending we all make more reasoned, rather than intuitive choices. I think he makes a good point. We need to be mindful of: - how we react when we feel threatened. - how we overreact when we feel like our reputation or career might suffer. - how we sometimes take on tasks that would be better done by others, even though they might do things differently. - decisions based purely on numbers. |
Posted on: December 05, 2006 01:20 AM
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Free Desktop Apps from Google
Situation: You need a low budget (or maybe just quick and easy) way to create and share a doc or spreadsheet. I was pretty skeptical about these at first, but Google Docs & Spreadsheets are very functional and you can't beat the price. They: - easily convert in and out of standard formats. - offer some pretty cool collaborative functions - are easily shared over the web on Google's servers Here's an example of a simple Word Doc deliverable template from gantthead. Here is the same thing on Google Docs & Spreadsheets. |
Posted on: December 05, 2006 12:40 AM
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Is This Interesting?
| Situation: You're a bright PM ISO extra cash. My CIO, Shirzad, hates it when I go window shopping on the web for potentially interesting technologies and business models. When I first looked at BitWine I immediately pictured him rolling his eyes in disgust. The idea is that subject matter experts sell their time by the minute via the web. It doesnt necessarily work on the context of a "do everything" portal. The closest thing I could find to PM as a category was Risk Management and I can't say I would pay for the advice of the people there based on the info they've provided. Still, I wonder if it would work within the gantthead community. Right this minute, we have 281,747 members and we're pretty focused. So I think the people who come to us know what they are looking for and are likely to find it. I also think there are a lot of smart people out there - experts in our field, who don't mind helping others. Would something like this be appealing? Does the money matter at all? Please comment or just send me an email at [email protected]. |
Posted on: November 30, 2006 12:33 PM
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Free Project Extranet Software
| Situation: You run simple projects with remote clients and are on a tight budget.
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dotProject
Posted on: November 26, 2006 11:24 PM
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What's on Your Mind?
Situation: You need to brainstorm or communicate a complex idea Mind mapping (as an approach to communicating ideas) has been around for a while. At the recent PMI World Congress the Mindjet folks were demostrating some pretty neat little templates they had created in their tool. Whether this is the right tool to manage your projects in is debatable, but MindManager is one of my favorite tools for brainstorming and presenting many types of information hierarchies. I especially like it when: - breaking down a problem into manageable parts. - making sure we are covering all of our bases. That having been said, I could certainly see using these templates with a group of executive sponsors to explain what's happening on a project. If you've never tried it, they offer a free trial download on their site. |
Posted on: November 26, 2006 10:54 PM
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