I attended the HDI conference in Orlando this week briefly to give a presentation on common cloud support issues and how some organizations respond with effective knowledge management processes.

My presentation was at 7:30 AM on Thursday morning. I had low expectations for the number of attendees, but I was pleasantly surprised. The rather large room was mostly full. People are interested in hearing what cloud-related incidents other organizations see as well as how organizations are handling those incidents.

So sometimes in life you have to say that you are wrong. You messed up. Even though you may have had good intentions, the way you handled something was totally wrong. As a leader, eating crow tastes like crud. It is challenging to lead a team in any circumstances, but to say to a team that you were wrong is of the most awkward and yet responsible things you can do as a leader.

You are in the Executing phase of your project. As project manager, you receive weekly status reports on work progress from team members. In reviewing the inputs from your team members, you are particularly interested in two tasks: Task 89 has an EST of 45 and an LST of 58; Task 101 has an EST of 64 and an LST of 51. Which of these tasks is riskiest?

How many times were you told that it is not a good idea to reinvent the wheel? Social media drives change to this philosophy, and we must continue to reinvent the wheel to stay competitive in this new age. What type of wheel do you model your project management style after? Is this working for you, or is it time to reinvent your project management wheel?

In the current version of the ITIL Foundation class, the following exam question appears in one of the two sample exams used in the class:
Which one of the following is the CORRECT sequence of activities for handling an incident?
The rationale behind the answer is simply, “The correct order is given in the diagram in the incident management process, and in the subsections of [SO] 4.2.5.” In this post, I will provide a better explanation of why this is the correct answer.

Which of the following BEST describes a Service?

So this week I find myself faced with another uphill climb of trying to change corporate culture about something that is “the way it has always been” because I truly believe that the change is the right thing to do. My peers tell me to keep pushing that rock up the hill, and that they are right behind me.

I know that being a project manager can be hard. Not just the juggle of resources, stakeholder management, impossible timelines, limited budgets, and needing to get herculean efforts out of a team that doesn’t report to you or consider what you need them to do a priority — but it also can be hard because we are identified as the bad guys forcing people to change their job.

During a recent ITIL foundation class, a student asked an interesting question. She wanted to know:

“What is the difference between a project and a service?”

To be honest, I haven’t spent much time thinking about this distinction. However, I think that those of us who practice ITIL consulting and training should have good answers to questions such as this.

Here’s how I answered this question.

A PMP receives a contract from a client to manage a software development project. The PMP discovers that 25 percent of the software developers are also contractors and none of them have legal software licenses. What should the PMP do?

The term “life cycle” implies two things: that a process is perpetual and that the sequence of events is obligatory or uni-directional. There is no beginning or end to a life cycle and the sequence of events cannot change. A seed cannot go directly to being a mature plant nor revert back to the blossom stage.