With the canicule that France is suffering from at the moment, the weather is the talk of the town. The heatwave has surpassed the general French favourite of food as the topic of the moment and it is one good reason to work long hours – at least we have air conditioning in the office…
Over my career, the majority of my projects have involved people who already work together. I remember working with one team that I had to form from scratch, who had never worked together before and who had never worked on a project before. In that situation, having little rituals worked wonders in explaining what a…
The sales are on in Paris at the moment. The sales are government-controlled, so all shops have a sale at the same time and sales at any other moment are forbidden. On my way to the bus stop each morning I walk past 5 lingerie shops, full of plastic models with drawn-on stomach muscles and…
You might remember I have written before about the Gypsy Moth IV project. It was a project to restore Sir Francis Chichester’s yacht and sail it around the world. Unfortunately, the objectives of the project have now changed considerably. Gypsy Moth IV ran aground and now the objective is to salavage something good from the…
The web revamp project started at the beginning of June, and is being delivered in a relatively short period of time. “The site architecture and wireframe design are completed,” Seifer says. “The back end administration modules and front-end design are nearly complete. The site is on a development server, and will be launched within the next 30 days, along with the topic blogs.”
Why is it that some weeks make you feel like you’re drowning and in others you’re just driftwood in the sea of project management, bobbing along with not a care in the world? This week has been a drowning week. I have found myself with two miniscule projects to sort out, and the smaller the…
When Sophie Hopkins, 24, took on the role of project manager for the Fordhall Community Land Initiative, I have to hope she knew what she was letting herself in for. After working for months without a salary, she now gets paid from an EU grant but her days often don’t finish until long into the…
This post is late too. Sorry – it won’t become a regular habit, but here’s a warning for next Monday: as I’m getting the sleeper train back from Nice late Sunday night I doubt I’ll be in much of a state to post anything lucid after getting off the train and going straight to work….
Sorry this post is a day late – I have been distracted with visitors and the Eurostar Da Vinci Code Quest. I gave my presentation on Scope Management to the British Computer Society’s Project Management Specialist Group on Thursday, which went well. They were kind enough to give me a souvenir paperweight as a memento…
Touching wood last week must have worked as lo and behold, after a few days of stamping my feet in a Gallic way my licences have arrived. And I already have one very happy client holding meetings with our Australian office, albeit rather cruelly on a Friday morning. Which is 6.30 pm Oz-time, when our…
After half an hour I was starting to notice that my fingers, wrapped around my block of ice glass, were no longer there.
The office is going into emergency mode at the moment in preparation for crippling strikes tomorrow. We’ve received flyers from the unions, an email from HR about how to get to work despite there being only 37% service on some lines. How the RATP have calculated their service that precisely I’m not sure, but given…