LIVING ORDER: On becoming a project leader

(Photo of microphone) (Photo approved for reuse under CC0) Tackling a threat head-on before it becomes a true problem may at times be the only way to prevent a major disruption in the lif...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/09/singing-karaoke.html

(US Air Force photo, by Michael Dukes, 2012 - photo labeled for reuse) Terry Little, a project manager with the U.S. Air Force, describes in the following story how he implemented 'mov...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/08/moving-about-and-trust.html

CC0 public domain/ free reuse, no attribution required In their book A Passion for Excellence, Tom Peters and Nancy Austin suggest that “the number one productivity problem in America is...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/07/managing-by-moving-about.html

photo by Emilie Reutenauer; permission to reuse under terms of GNU Free Documentation License and under CreativeCommons While frequent communication has a vital role in the early identif...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/06/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

 (Image: free use under CreativeCommons, no attribution required) Jim Wink, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, reported that his team had encountered over 200 unexpected events during the li...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-project-managers-chief-daily-task.html

Planning is a decision-making process whereby interdependent decisions are integrated into a system of decisions. What makes effective planning particularly challenging is that it entails...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/04/evolving-planning-rolling-wave-approach.html

The upcoming several blogs will provide a brief overview of the new book: Becoming a Project Leader: Blending Planning, Agility, Resilience, and Collaboration to Deliver Successful Projects,...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2017/03/development-of-valid-project-management.html

This month we feature a story penned by Jeff Russell, co-executive director of the Consortium for Project Leadership at UW-Madison.  Excerpt: > ... Experience is an ongoing process, a...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/10/leadership-development-by-failure-case.html

In 2001, the British management business leader and philosopher Charles Handy vividly described the pace of change: “All of the world’s trade in 1949 happens in a single day today, all o...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/08/how-pickup-truck-taught-us-that_16.html

In last month’s blog , Colonel Jeanne C. Sutton of the U.S. Air Force shared a story that reaffirmed the value of trusting your judgment. This month, we’re relying on her experiences onc...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/07/timing-is-crucial.html

Colonel Jeanne C. Sutton of the U.S. Air Force, a former chief of International Programs in the Acquisition/Theater Defense Deputate of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, had been a...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/06/trust-your-judgment.html

In the previous blog , TERRY LITTLE, former director of the Air Force Acquisition Center of Excellence — considered by many to be the best project manager at the US Defense Department in...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-project-manager-must-be-team.html

Jim Collins’s book, Good to Great, has sold over 2.5 million hardcover copies, and has been translated into 32 languages. According to Collins, one of the principles practiced by the most ...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/04/first-whothen-what.html

(continued from Clearing the Air, part 1 ) For the pilots of the Israeli Defense Force’s 109 Squadron, the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War did not go as planned. The invasion by Egyp...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/03/clearing-air-part-2-overcoming-crisis.html

Today’s project managers have to know how to lead their teams within a dynamic environment, and there’s no more dynamic environment than war. On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria simultan...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/02/clearing-air-part-1-how-109-squadron.html

(pond at Apalachicola National Forest in Florida) When we began this blog in early 2014 we explained the name of the blog, “Living Order,” this way: It was the French Nobel Prize w...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2016/01/leadership-key-for-project-learning-and.html

The “more than enough” components of successful projects are at the heart of Tom Peters’ philosophy of project management. Author of The Project 50, Peters constantly strives to transf...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/12/from-good-enough-to-more-than-enough.html

photo by Koshy Koshy In our previous blog we described how Don Margolies, a project manager from NASA, applied the 80/20 principle. Now we will describe how Don did not just apply this pr...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-doctrine-of-enough.html

In 1964, Peter Drucker wrote in his classic book, Managing for Results: "Concentration is the key to economic results. Economic results require that… efforts be concentrated on the few ...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-5050-principle-vs-8020-principle.html

 (Gen. George McClellan - image in public domain)             In their book, Fusion Leadership, Daft and Lengel argue: “Leadership in a destabilized world means nonconformi...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/09/to-succeed-in-todays-dynamic.html

Making quick decisions is often based on a process of learning by action. The learning-by-action mode is adopted when uncertainty (missing information) is coupled with an increased demand ...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/08/act-first-think-later.html

This is the second of a two-part story. (Read part 1 here .) Changing one’s mindset to consider reviews as a vital LEARNING opportunity is not easy. While the reviewing organization ofte...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/07/conduct-learning-based-reviews-part-2.html

A previous story at this blog, Saving Lives: Expecting Problems or Burying Them  (June 2014), highlights learning during the life of a project through a metaphor from the operating room. In...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/06/conduct-learning-based-reviews-part-1.html

In his book Augustine’s Laws, Norman Augustine discusses the problems of process-oriented cultures, among them too many regulations and the dangers of “playing it safe.” One of the arg...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/05/playing-it-safe-or-not.html

Bridge collapse, 1940, Tacoma, Washington (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections) Lucy Suchman opens her book, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine C...

http://living-order.blogspot.com/2015/04/coping-with-failures.html