The Sunday Lunch Project

I have done all of these in one form or another. Not proud but understand why I have done.How many have you done. How to Be the Worst Project Manager on the Planet: 11 Habits to Stop Now!

I have created a new page on the blog which will list resources for all project managers, be they new to it or experienced. The links are to things that I have benefited from and hope you do too.  If by doing so I help one PM find something that will make the next stakeholder meeting a little less tense or the words for the next project update simpler then I am happy. I will add to this list over time but if you have a recommendation just add a comment to this post or drop me a mail. Here is the link http://thesundaylunchproject.blogspot.com/p/other-project-management-sitesblogs.html All the best and I hope you find it useful.

I had a long day yesterday and little access to my email, so while watching Jamie does...... I checked my mail and I found a number of emails which were marked as important so naturally had a look at those first.  To my surprise one of the mails was a list of training courses available for the coming month and my first reaction was "Why has this person marked this as important, it's not important to me." and following on from this I have been thinking about relative importance of emails. I do not, as a matter of course, use the important button unless I am sending something to my team that I want them look at quickly.  As I do not do it often the impact appears to be OK because they check the mails I send them pretty quickly anyway but this extra emphasis gets the results. When sending an email to someone who is not in my team I very, very, rarely use the important button because important is a subjective assessment.  Things that I consider important in my role may be

I am sat in the doctors waiting room and the doctor is running an hour late. That now puts me an hour late. Somehow I will have to either catch up the time or write it off and hope the some form of karma will give me an hour back sometime in the future. It makes me think that this is how we can end up having project problems, someone slips on a dependency for you or the resource is not available to start on time. On the face of it what's an hour? Either the resource will pick up the slipped hour or we can do a bit of overtime later if needed. Then later arrives, the person doing the work did not catch up the hour they did the job is 32 hours as estimated, 20 other minor slips happen and you are now 200 hours down and it's Friday and just a weekend before go live, you only have 3 people available to help. How the hell did I get in this mess, nothing major has happenned. Does this sound familiar? Maybe a bit extreme? As a PM it makes me think we all need to be mindful of thes

Just got an email from a company in the states saying they are liking my work on the blog and want to contribute and give me some of their products for free to use or offer as a prize. Got no idea whether I think this is a good idea or not, on the one hand it means I will get some more content for the site, but in the other hand I need to be to sure that the content is aligned with values of the Sunday Lunch Project. I will have a chat with the guy who runs the firm but I am quite shocked considering I have little content on the site for the the past few weeks. I have tweaked the first paragraph of the book and developed a few more of the plot ideas, characters and twists. It's gonna take time but I am determined to finish this one.

Now I have not done a lot so far, but ideas continue to flow and my notes are increasing. I have found that alternative ideas spring to mind and have gone back to a couple of my other book ideas and done some work on those. So I am thinking that the only I can get myself going is to set my self some task related goals and rewards. So number 1 is that I will write in my blog at least once per week, be it about the book or about project management in general. So this week I thought I would share a couple of sites which you may find of interest if you are interested in project management. Firstly an author in the UK who launched his book last year and has been getting good reviews and seems to be on every PM related podcast around the world. Peter Taylor has published the book the Lazy Project Manager which takes a slightly different approach to thinking about the priorities of managing projects you can find out more at www.thelazyprojectmanager.com Secondly the podcast where I first

So I thought I would share how this idea came about and it evolved. I had been thinking of article ideas to help me practice for writing my other book and to get some feedback on my style. To get some additional benefit I thought I would target the content at project management which, if published, would allow me to claim it as a continued professional development activity and assist in keeping my PMI qualification (more information can be found here http://www.pmi.org.uk/ ) So while on a caravan holiday in a lovely South Wales site in Wiseman's Bridge I started putting down my ideas using a mindmap, and thought I would have the makings of a reasonable article. The thing was as I sat there with a bunch of coloured pencils and a pad the ideas start to run and the gallop and in front of me was more than enough material for an article and then I thouught could this be a book. Since then I had not done anything much with it or my other books until I read Peter Taylors book thelazypr