It is clear that over the past 50 years Deming’s ideas have become the dominant management doctrine among the western industrialised nations and have often been lauded for the transformation of Japanese car manufacturing in the 1970’s. Adoption of these ideas by Toyota and other Japanese car manufacturers generated such stunning productivity that it firmly entrenched these companies as the dominant players in the modern, global car manufacturing market.
Heart land of Deming & Taylor – The production line.
Despite this transformation in manufacturing, Deming’s doctrines have not had the same impact on the civil engineering, construction and to some extent the IT industries. The reason for this can be traced back to Deming & Taylor’s focus on improving production line efficiency. In contrast civil engineering and construction derive their revenue almost exclusively from the sale of unique project ventures which are rarely repeated. A key difference.
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I am sure many of my regular readers are aware of the huge number of comments and long running dialogue concerning my post Agile Fails to Get to Grips with Human Psychology.
Chaplin’s “Modern Times”
Recently one of my regular commenter’s decided to bring up an age old argument of Systems versus Individuals or better known as Taylor Vs Deming. I am conscious that a post working through my opinion on this age old argument is something more befitting a book rather than a short blog post, and as such I am in danger of over simplifying a very complex issue and it’s relevance to the software industry.
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Posted by Kevin Brady on Wed 20th September 2006 at 05:42 PM, Filed in PMO
For those newbie’s to Project Management – What is meant by the term “PMO”?
PMO is an abbreviation /stands for “Project Management Office” and is an office or department responsible for establishing, maintaining and enforcing project management processes, procedures, and standards. It provides services, support, and certification for project managers.
The set-up of PMOs has become very fashionable recently, with rapidly increasing numbers of PMOs set-up each year. This is evidenced by salaries of PMO related staff almost doubling in the last 18 months.
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Posted by Kevin Brady on Mon 18th September 2006 at 05:19 AM, Filed in Free Check Lists
FREE IT Project Health Check – Click here to download Zipped File
On a recent trip to see a client, I was browsing through my laptop hard drive when I cam across one of the more reliable project failure surveys, published by the Standish Group and entitled CHAOS.
Health Checks can sometimes be a real eye opener!
The key issue I noticed with this survey and others of the same ilk is the fact that the survey is only as good as the survey team responsilbe for its design. The survey designers “have to know what they don’t know to ask the right questions”. This means, to get the most out of such a survey, you really need experienced project managers on the team, responsible for compiling and designing the survey questions.
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Posted by Kevin Brady on Tue 12th September 2006 at 03:30 AM, Filed in Free Check Lists
Click to download free Due Diligence Checklist
Computer Weekly recently published a CIO survey and one of the questions was “are you happy with the performance of your software suppliers?”
Angry and frustrated?
Apparently, 90% agreed with this statement with only 10% disagreeing. I have to say this is not a response I would have expected when you take into account the currently stratospheric IT project failure rates (70% to 92% per annum). First hand experience has always shown (after auditing 50 + projects & programmes of work during my career) that the inappropriate selection and engagement of third party suppliers is one of the key aggravating factors behind many IT project /programme failures. For example, Computerweekly has been running a big campaign to try and stamp out the well-known and growing practice of “stiffing”.
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