Thursday 22 July 2010

The Value of Values

Values, everyone has them whether they’re written down or not. Some are negative and some are positive. It’s belief in them that gives them credibility and establishes their value. Where a mission statement defines a company’s purpose, it is the values that help define the behaviours it wants exhibited in order to achieve the mission. Companies can spend ridiculously large sums of money defining, documenting and displaying their values. They’re often quick to capitalise both internally to staff and externally to their market, when they (usually senior management or executives) are displaying those carefully crafted values. Yet it’s interesting to observe how much faster they are to minimise, possibly even ignore, when they’re not. Dare I suggest these often very expensive values only have value when it suits?

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Podcast with Guerrilla Project Management

Earlier this year I was absolutely delighted to be interviewed by Samad Aidane for his Guerrilla Project Management podcast. Samad is not only a genuine and generous guy who I'm honoured to know, he's also a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with over 15 years of IT experience. His Guerrilla Project Management blog is the place for "conversations about the mindset that Project Managers must adopt to be able to effectively manage today’s complex projects".

An experienced and good PM is always prepared and Samad proved this 10 fold with his prep work. He didn't just flick a few questions through on an email, oh no; Samad had absolutely done his homework and identified exactly the pieces from my articles he thought would interest his audience. I'm just glad he forwarded them to me so I had sufficient time to get my responses into some semblance of order!

Figuring out our time zones was probably the most difficult part as Samad made our interview together feel like we were having a normal conversation. Go listen and while you're there subscribe to his RSS feed, listen to his other podcasts and read through his various blog posts. You won't regret it.