In a recent article at Information Management, Maria Villar and Theresa Kushner offer 4 Steps to Create an Effective IT and Business Partnership, a very useful list of ways to ensure “strong partnership between IT and business”. To the authors this partnership “is the most important, and often overlooked, component to successfully managing critical business data. Undertaking business intelligence, data quality or an enterprise data management [program] without full cooperation and collaboration between IT and the business is a formula for frustration.” The authors suggest these four steps: “know your partner, develop a relationship, define roles and responsibilities, and establish open, regular communication channels.” I recommend reading this article because IT folks (like me) seem tempted to neglect the habits that enable building a solid relationship with business people. Continue reading »
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It is only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” – from Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Whatever project management approach a team uses, sometimes everything falls apart, commonly due to work piling up at the end, but sometimes due to a key individual leaving, or a pivotal assumption no longer holding true, or many other reasons. When that happens, the project can become like a whack-a-mole game, with leads working from issue to issue as they pop up faster and faster. Continue reading »