Q1 Media Universe Map by Evan Shapiro

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The Exceeding Banality of Burning Projects

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Listening to a podcast recently I heard a project manager say of himself that he is often given the project that are "already on fire." I cringed, because I have made that comment myself quite a few times. Too often it was in interviews that I made the boast. It's not really that remarkable for a project manager to be handed a project on fire and asked to make something of it.  There are many reasons for a project to be "going south," and it's going to show time, cost, scope, and possibly, ultimately, quality. One such project for me was a cloud migration. A major data center was being shut down and all the services hosted there had to be migrated to the cloud. When I got involved it was already badly behind schedule, and extra cost had been incurred in renewing the lease on a data center's space while also paying for cloud services. What had happened was a project manager had laid out a very solid plan for doing the migration in waves. It was going to i
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The Law of the Instrument

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Jeff Geerling (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) It's been said that "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." That's a cognitive bias called the 'Law of the Instrument,' and one that I've encountered in the workplace a number of times. It might sound familiar to you as well.  The worst example I can give is of the time I worked in a division of a company that used Power Point for pretty much everything. All reporting took place through Power Point slides, which is fine for high level presentations but not great when you need to get into details. Not long into my employment I was told emphatically that I had to create a 'detailed project plan' in Power Point. On one occasion I joined a meeting to discover that the person running it had used a one slide Power Point deck for the agenda. It was as if no one could imagine there being a different way to work. Honestly, I don't know how it gets this bad in an organization. That it becomes a hidebou
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Agile for Non-Engineering Teams

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It was really a pretty large group we gathered for an introduction to Agile, and none of them were software developers. This was several years ago now at a major media company where I had been recently promoted to program manager. A senior scrum master was assisting me with the training portion for the archivists who were part of my newly-formed program group. They were going to be part of an Agile transformation that would range from them through the streaming partnership team and on to broadcast engineers. And, importantly, almost none of them had ever heard of Agile before.  Some might wonder why we even bothered with an Agile transformation for such a group. The answer is that 1) we weren't forcing it on them, 2) we really believed it would help, and 3) the PMO was answering a call to help the entire organization become Agile, if possible. It turns out that Agile practices, Jira, and a bunch of librarians combines marvelously. It was something of a wonder how well and quickly t
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