The Science of Management: does it really help us?

science help businessLast week I’ve been talking to a friend who was just editing the final exam for his course “Decision-making in Disaster management”. Living aside the nice feeling of talking to people from the academic environment, there was actually something in our conversation that troubled me to the level of feeling a need to share it with the readers of my blog. Continue reading

Why it’s so hard to follow schedules?

ScheduleThere is nothing new in the fact that timelines established for the projects are rarely met. Actually, we got so used to this part of workplace reality that we consider it a problem only in the most outrageous cases – when the project’s cost exceeded every budgeting expectation or when it outlived its usefulness by becoming irrelevant.

Is there a way to improve this situation? Before we are able to answer this question, we need to understand what prevents us from following the schedule in the first place. Continue reading

Lessons Learned: How to Deal with Failure

lessons learnedA few weeks ago a friend sent me an amazing piece of memorabilia – a journal article from the year 1905. It made such an impression on me that I immediately decided to share its wisdom on the ever discussed question of what is success and what is failure and how can we influence their relationship by learning the lessons our life experience provides us with. Continue reading

Constant change of human resources – the impact on our projects

change of human resourcesIn my previous post, I provided an extreme example of how critical to organization could be the loss of knowledge and expertise in some cases. Even though in many other, more usual cases, the loss would not be felt immediately, the cumulative effect could be more than Continue reading

“Why do you need Long-term goals?” – From Ask Anya mails

Ask Anya MailFollowing post: Why do you need long-term goals”.

“I have a problem with having too much emphasis on the long-term. When people concentrate on the general vision they tend to forget “small”, but important things like legal aspects, marketing, funding, etc. that can potentially prevent their “great vision” from coming into reality.  How do you solve this contradiction?” Continue reading

Embracing Change – From Ask Anya mails

Ask Anya MailFollowing series of posts on Change Management – “Why change doesn’t stick?”

Question:

Change is important, but it involves risk and it is very hard to motivate the team members to embrace the changes and even harder is to get help with identifying the real risks in a constructive way. How can I make the team members to be proactive and get them on board?” Continue reading

This is Sparta?!! – Since when did it become a norm not to achieve any result?

SpartaDuring one of my previous employments, a rumor came through the grapevine (you know how it is) that 300 people are going to be laid off next week. Putting aside what it did to the overall mood in the workplace, something bothered me about the number itself. Continue reading

Why do you need long-term goals?

Importance of long term goalsA few years ago I have had an honor to participate in a panel on military technology development. It comprised several specialists from different fields, including IT, Theoretical Physics, Medicine, Disaster Management and, of course – guys in uniform.

It was most interesting to learn how they deal with different management-related problems Continue reading

When to stop doing what you’re doing?

Hi, how’s work?

Your team is working like clockwork, all your projects are delivered on time, your business is so profitable that it leaves the competition behind?

No? Yes, but…?

Then may be YOU HAVE TO CHANGE SOMETHING. Continue reading

Decision-Making and Strategic Planning: how to fight Uncertainty

Decision making and Strategy planning: How to fight UncertaintyDecision-making by its nature has a natural connection to long-term planning: by trying our best to make our decisions better we’re trying to influence the future. Taking into account our decisions and their possible consecutive outcomes is practically the essence of planning strategically. The problem is: how can we know the results of our future decisions to plan our next move? How can we fight the uncertainty of the future? Continue reading