Does Your Business Case Pass The Toddler Test? I have written, reviewed, and signed off on Business Cases for over 15 years. I have been a parent for three and a half years. It took me two years of being a parent to realize the not always obvious overlap between these two important roles (one […]
Category: Entries

The Risk of Inaction (ROI)
Investopedia explains Return on investment (ROI) as a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to the investment’s cost. This post is not about that. I […]

The importance of being multi-disciplinary with Sustainable Project Management
There is an ongoing debate about whether it is better to be a specialist or a generalist in the marketplace. Some recruiters have provided a recommendation of playing it safe by positioning yourself as a “specialist, with breadth.” In a Forbes article they recommended being a specialist in your topic and desire, and being a […]

Lessons from Harvard 4: How Adaptive Project Teams can work with Command & Control
This is the final of four posts based on my experience at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program that I took in November 2017, led by Dr. Leith Sharp, integrated with some of our GPM Global content where appropriate. The intent of these posts is to show […]

Lessons from Harvard 3: Discovering the Squiggle on Projects
This is the third of four posts based on my experience at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program that I took in November 2017, led by Dr. Leith Sharp, integrated with some of our GPM Global content where appropriate. The intent of these posts is to show […]

Lessons from Harvard 2: Understanding Organizational “Operating Systems”
This is the second of four posts based on my experience at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program that I took in November 2017, led by Dr. Leith Sharp, integrated with some of our GPM Global content where appropriate. The intent of these posts is to show […]

Lessons from Harvard 1: Organizational Dynamics Set the Stage for Change
This is the first of four posts based on my experience at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program that I took in November 2017, led by Dr. Leith Sharp, integrated with some of our GPM Global content where appropriate. The intent of these posts is to show […]

We Need to Raise Capable Leaders; Yesterday.
We in the Project profession must rethink what leadership means. The textbook dictionary definition of “leader” is a person or thing that leads or a guiding or directing head, as of an army, movement, or political group. “Directing hand” is close but doesn’t quite exemplify what we need in order to raise capable successors. We […]

Putting 2020 in the Rearview Mirror
When COVID-19 decided to lay claims to 2020, every organization on the planet was impacted. As we search for the light at the end of the tunnel (and hope it is not an oncoming train), we are all faced with the question, “what now?” I am sure many of us during this pandemic have felt […]

COVID-19 Sustainable Lessons 07: Dealing with Cobb’s Paradox
“We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure—so why do they still fail?” Martin Cobb, Treasury Board Secretariat 1995 Cobb’s Paradox and the Solution This paradox has been frequently raised again and again in the project management community over the years. A generally accepted solution to it though seems particularly appropriate […]