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- Good consultants know when to be "invisible"
- Sometimes you need to take a backseat to the client team so that they can fully develop the skills they'll need after you're gone. Shannon Kalvar describes becoming an "invisible consultant" in order to allow a client to become the star of the project. by Shannon Kalvar
- Tags: Project, Team, Consultant, Consulting, Shannon Kalvar, Larry, Team Management, Outsourcing, Management, It Operations, Business Operations, Outsourcing & Subcontracting
- Blog posts 2008-06-26
- Dealing with a mistrustful client
- A CIO hires a consultant to examine the feasibility of outsourcing his IT team. When the consultant tries to handle the inevitable bad feelings of the in-house team, he finds that this extreme challenge also raises ethical questions. by Shannon Kalvar
- Tags: Team, CIO, Consultant, Agent, Team Management, Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2008-06-23
- Proving to business leaders that new technology is not just a gimmick
- Learn how to overcome the resistance of business leaders to new technology projects through more effective communication. by Shannon Kalvar
- Tags: Gimmick, Information Technology, Leader, Manager, Productivity, Leadership, Strategy, Operational Planning, Management, Business Operations, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2008-06-17
- A consultant's technical pride causes his team considerable delays
- Don't make this consultant's mistake: taking on project issues that don't suit your technical abilities. Letting your team apply its strengths to project work will allow you to focus on planning and management duties, and you'll all meet your deadlines. by Shannon Kalvar
- Tags: Team, Leadership, Problem, Team Management, Servers, Management, Hardware, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2008-06-16
- Two ways to envision a project in order to select the correct resolution techniques
- Every few months someone comes to me and asks for help with the same problem. They don't know it's the same problem. In fact, it manifests differently each and every time. Fortunately a wise old man once taught me the difference between principles, methods, techniques, and results,...
- Tags: Technique, Box, Project, Productivity, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2008-01-13
- How consultants are like Santa's elves
- I know that I take myself and my profession far too seriously. After all, managing projects for other people is how I pay for the roof over my family's head and the food they eat. However, during the Christmas season even I take a step back to ponder...
- Tags: Toy, Outsource, Big Man, Outsourcing, Supply Chain, It Operations, Business Operations, Outsourcing & Subcontracting, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-12-02
- Three things I wish someone had told me when I started consulting
- Years ago I had a choice of what career path to take. I chose to be a consultant, working long hours for modest pay in a field which at the time seemed pretty stable. The roller-coaster ride hasn't stopped since. For the most part it's been a...
- Tags: Job, Consultant, Client, Consulting, Recruitment & Selection, Outsourcing, Professional Development, Human Resources, Workforce Management, It Operations, Business Operations, Outsourcing & Subcontracting, Career, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-11-25
- Three tricks for dealing with the holidays as a consulting project manager
- Travel costs have skyrocketed. No one is available to finish off those last ugly bits of work before the budgets run out. Everyone seems to want to hang out with their families, generally in inaccessible places, rather than burn the midnight oil finishing off our wildly out of...
- Tags: Team, Holiday, Project Manager, Consulting, Team Management, Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-11-18
- Some thoughts on passing as an extrovert
- A lot of professional project management consultants choose to pass rather than reveal their true colors. We choose to pretend to welcome people to our cubes, to speak up during the unending roll of meetings, and to actually leave our space in order to find out what is going...
- Tags: Team, Team Management, Project Management, Tools & Techniques, Strategy, Management, It Operations, It service Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-11-11
- Three ways project managers give in to threats
- We live in a corporate environment and indeed a social one where the fear of personal, financial, or political harm counts for more than the honest calculation of risk. Economists are slowly starting to key onto this with their calculations of "perceived risk"; priests, theologians, and mothers everywhere probably...
- Tags: Project Manager, Threat, Tools & Techniques, Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-10-28
- Some advice on taking advice
- Many project management blogs, including this one, talk a lot about what to do in a specific set of circumstances. We share "tricks of the trade", ranging from organizational tips to silly little things like using colored dots to mark out where we want to put an outlet or...
- Tags: Advice, Idea, Project Management, Time Management, Tools & Techniques, Strategy, It Operations, It service Management, Productivity, Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-10-21
- Three practical tools for clarifying where you want things in new locations
- As a consultant, part of what I do involves perceptions and manipulations. A larger part of what I do is drudgery, involving constant sorting and resorting of information. The smallest part, the part I really enjoy, involves helping people figure out what they need to do and how they will...
- Tags: Laser Pointer, Workstation, Dot, Tool, Productivity, Fax, Workstations, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-10-13
- Four reasons people like failing projects
- I am personally from the "kill projects early and often" school of program management. I like to see project ideas come up, go though preliminary investigation, then die a deserved death before they drag dozens or hundreds of people down a primrose path to hell. Unfortunately, very few...
- Tags: Project, Team Management, Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-10-06
- Three tricks to help sort out work from activity
- Over the years I've written a great deal about the difference between activity and work. However, I don't know if I've ever actually explained what the heck I'm muttering about or why it's important. We'll start with the last question first, since it gets straight to the heart...
- Tags: Question, Productivity, Time Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-09-30
- Use one simple question to help get the project back on track
- Have you ever listened to people talk about how, when, and why they failed? Or, for that matter, listened to your own stories about how circumstances and events conspired to create a "perfect storm" in which failure simply could not be avoided? These things, we say, just happen...
- Tags: Team, Failure, Question, Team Management, Management, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-09-22
- How to leverage a project assistant's unintentional role as project archivist
- Today, I'm going to talk about a resource most of us don't have the opportunity to utilize often enough. The project assistant, a combination secretary, record-keeper, and general project minder who is probably not a project manager himself but who by dent of effort knows as much as any...
- Tags: Project Manager, Assistant, Project Assistant, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-09-10
- Using contextual analysis to address project team problems
- Sometimes, when I'm out reading apparently random things for no particular reason, I run across two quotes which click together. In this case, I found something while out reading about the structure of military thought immediately after going though my archived e-mail. The quotes are as follows: ...
- Tags: Job, Developer, Team, Analyst, Analysis, Communications Specialist, Trainer, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-09-04
- Is project management a language rather than a discipline?
- Project management is, in theory at least, a common language spoken by facilities, IT, operations, and the company's management group. This common language allows individuals with very different experiences of the same business to communicate logically about expected outcomes and activities. Like all languages it relies heavily on...
- Tags: Project Management, Project Manager, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-08-27
- Three "project management sins" and how they affect our teams
- Project management as a profession barely recognizes the importance of individual ability or talent. In many ways, it evolved close to the nexus of our current society's tendency to sequester power and commodify talent. Even so, it directly manipulates the lives of real people, not just process and technology or...
- Tags: Project Management, Team, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-08-18
- Setting up priorities in an "A" world
- Lack of priority information is the death of management and the bane of leadership. It is also the single most common problem project managers run into when trying to filter activities into a critical path. The sophistry behind "They are all As" doesn't even begin to merit a...
- Tags: VPN, Project, Workstation, Project Manager, Shannon Kalvar
- Blog posts 2007-08-11
