Project Management, initiative, leadership

How often did it not happen to you to ask somebody to do something, wait for the result, and then notice that what you asked for and what you obtained is different? More often than we want to admit, there is a big gap between what you think you have communicated and what the other party has actually understood. And this happens when you talk with your peers face-to-face. Can you imagine what happens when the same request is done across geographic and cultural distances ? There are a lot of things that one has to take into account when working remotely , and these go from process and procedures to interactions and time differences. For solving all these points, there are quite a few tools and tips that one can use. But all these tools and all the processes in the world cannot solve by miracle one of the most critical points: different communication styles . The communication style is different from one person to another, based on their education, maturity, personality style, and so on....

I am really amazed by the people that spend most of their time travelling from one location to another, working with numerous people from different cities and locations. I am not talking about a traveller that is doing a pleasure trip, but of working guys that enjoy meeting lots of people and going to tens of locations just for work... I did only a few business trips, in not so many locations, but still I found it really cool. I'm not sure I could turn it into a work model, but I enjoyed. And took some nice pictures from my trips, too. I will show only one picture now, from Geneva. I want to start a traveller's notes website, with lots of pictures from my trips. Not the professional pictures type, but the amateur... Maybe I will see your pictures there, too.

Recently I've run into a lot of discussions about how to run a BOT business. Managing a BOT can pose a lot of issues if you don't respect some basic rules that you establish well ahead. Like with any other offshoring model, you need to have some expectations set from it. I am thinking of multiple points to be well defined ahead. I would start by setting an objective about team size to be reached in a period of time, and how you would get there ( recruitment process , selection, ramping up). Next, I would think about the types of projects that could be safely handed over to the BOT team, without putting at risk the high visibility projects. I would also consider having one key person managing the entire BOT, one person that I trust and that could be hired by my company, rather than the service provider. And to make a long story short, here is a very good link that talks about a particular case, really-really interesting: http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/c060320a.asp

I just got into the open source trend. You know, where people write software just for fun, and if they like it they make it available for the rest of the world... Some of it is not so good, actually, and you might get lost in their code, and you might start wondering what are you doing with that code after all... Come on, you would say, I could have written a much better code than that. And even contribute it to the community... But there a lot of very good pieces out there, that you should be using instead of writing from scratch. They have good quality of the code, well architected and flexible, and also good documentation that teaches you how to best use it, and they allow you to post bugs, and even to fix the bugs if you know how... All this good stuff is usually made not by only one person, but a whole team that has been working in their spare time just to make everything better. And the best thing is that any of us could be contributing to make it better. It doesn't ma...

Today I would like to discuss about meetings in the work environment. I'm pretty sure that you all have an agenda on your desk or in your computer, filled with lots of meetings every week and month. Are these meetings necessary? All of them? Do you reach your goals with these meetings? Here is one excerpt from a very interesting article: How many meetings did you attend or hold in 2006? Tens? Hundreds? Now, take a minute to consider how many of those meetings were actually turned into positive, productive action that made your business better. These are important questions to ask in a world of ‘fast-food communication’, where ondemand, real-time, dynamic collaboration technologies have quickly turned global business into a single, connected cube farm. Everyone has meetings; it’s up to you to determine whether the information and responsibilities shared in those meetings drives your success, or simply leads to deeper inefficiency. Here is the full article, to which I challenge to di...

I have just watched this great video of Guy Kawasaki: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3755718939216161559 !!! It is amazing how many things one can learn in just a 40 minutes presentation of the TEN key points he outlines and evangelizes... I strongly recommend anyone who wants to start a company to view this video and think again before actually moving on. It's full of truths and things that I have already seen happenning before, and I can tell you (without being a big entrepreneur) that he is right. I will search for more items like this one, an come back to you, it's really useful and meaningful!