Project Management Survival will soon be available in Polish.  Have to say I'm delighted as I have spent a fair ...   more »

I was reading about the McLaren F1 (developed by Gordon Murray). This car can reach nearly 240 mph (with some minor modifications) and cost around £8.5 million to get the first car out of the door - including building the factory it was made in.

In comparison, the Bugatti Veyron can travel 10 mph faster. The other difference is that the Veyron cost around £250 million to develop - which is expensive if you only sell 300 cars. The problem with the Veyron is that the boss Ferdinand Piech set up a BFHG (big fat hairy goal) of 250 mph (okay it was 400 km/h) and 1000 brake horsepower. Unfortunately this goal came with a big fat hairy pricetag.   more »

...it's at the interfaces that things most commonly go wrong. For example, the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because one group worked in yards and another in metres. Their invidual parts were fine but they didn't fit together. It's the railroad tracks meeting in the middle of the US and finding they use different gauges for the track (a great cartoon not a fact). How do you stop this happening in projects.   more »

I went into a development programme once and looked at the project plan. It looked good. That’s the problem with Microsoft Project (and Powerpoint) - the biggest, steaming pile of junk can be made to look good. The problem that makes this worse is that most senior managers are incapable of spotting a dodgy project plan when they’re two inches away from it.   more »

During the life of a project, the team will define milestones specific to the project and pass tollgates that are imposed to allow review of the project at important states in the project.    more »

Companies can be outstanding at generating new ideas – I mean really world-class and yet they struggle. The simple reason is they don’t have the resources to exploit them. I’m not talking about the resources not existing in the company, I am talking about them just not being available. If the resources are being used for something useful then is that okay? Well only if it is more valuable to the business than the project it is delaying. If not, then your resource prioritisation across the portfolio of projects better be good. However, the more frustrating problem for companies relates to when their resources are ‘lost’ to the business either still working on bad projects or doing ‘after sales’ on previous projects.    more »