Flashback Friday Flicks: Janet Bartz and Jane Shellum Video Interview

In the weeks leading up to the 2011 ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts® Conference, we're looking back at some of our top content from 2010.

In the video below, Agile Scout's Peter Saddington interviewed PWWCBA speakers Janet Bartz and Jane Shellum on implementing Agile techniques at the Mayo Clinic.



Perhaps the biggest take-away from this interview: "Create an environment where it is ok to try something and fail."

Learn more about the Mayo Clinic session from 2010 by reading the full recap here.

Time is running out to join us at PWWCBA! Don't forget that readers of our blog receive an exclusive 15% discount off the standard registration rate with code PW11BLOG. Register today.

New York City's CityTime Project

In our most recent issue of the ProjectNews newsletter, we explored New York City's CityTime Project. The original goal for the NYC CityTime project was to streamline the timekeeping system for public employees, making the government accountable for its employees and prevent employees from getting paid for time not spent working.

The project was estimated to cost the city $68 million and be completed within 5 years, however the project has now cost over $740 million.

Meanwhile, this article in the Wall Street Journal acknowledges that "To date, 163,388 employees in more than 60 agencies are now on the electronic payroll system," progress that some are seeing as a victory for the beleaguered project.

In that same article Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith "said the administration 'learned some valuable lessons' and plans in the comings weeks to release a report that details how the city will better manage these types of IT projects."

While we wait to see the results of that report, share your own experiences and ideas. Have you ever worked on a project that ran far over budget and time estimates? What lessons were learned in the process?

View ProjectNews and other industry resources here.

What Happens When A Project Fails?

We might not want to acknowledge it, but failure happens. Goals sometimes don't get met, time-lines slip, projects fall apart. How do you react when faced with failure? And as a leader, how do you prevent small failures from snowballing into a completely failed project.

This blog post on the Harvard Business Review caught my eye as a unique illustration of the different ways people deal with failure.

In the post author and Bregman Partners, Inc. CEO Peter Bregman writes:

Most of us miss that. Typically, when people fail, we blame them. Or teach them. Or try to make them feel better. All of which, paradoxically, makes them feel worse. It also prompts defensiveness as an act of self-preservation. (If I'm not okay after a failure, I'd better figure out how to frame this thing so it's not my failure.)

Who hasn't been there? Or on the receiving end? It's a natural instinct to try and distance oneself from failure in a business situation, but a good leader needs to take a step back, evaluate, and decide what their team needs in each case. Is this the time for cutting losses? Learning a lesson? Or simply practicing acceptance.

What skills and practices do you employ when dealing with the failure of a project? What failures have you faced, and how have you put things back on track?

Do project managers need to fail to succeed?

In an interesting article at Tech Republic, Paul Glen believes that beginning project managers need to fail before they succeed. Beginning project managers don't have the ability or know-how to manage the tasks, the people and the risk management the first few projects they manage.

Instead, he believes that project managers need a little bumper room the first few times they manage a project:

• A few big mistakes
• Permission to make those mistakes
• Coaching and introspection to learn from them
  

Do you agree? Are the best project managers the ones that are given room to fail in the beginning?