In previous posts we have talked about readiness and I am sure it will always pop up. One my challenges is patience for client readiness as it seems so obvious to me.  I was reading Robert Schaffer’s book Rapid Results and was interested to see what he had to say when I rec

Welcome to the 18th Episode of the CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X. As of late I have been interested to see how Process and Organizational change are supported in Enterprise Data Warehousing as the business intelligence gets plugged back into the business continuum.  Tod

Harvey really believed that words should be used carefully and you mean what you write and say.  When I would put in a report "I feel ….".  Harvey would question the use and suggest that I really mean "I think……".   One that st

Welcome to the 16th Episode of the CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X. Today I welcome Kim a Program Manager at a large Financial Services organization.  Kim came from the IT ranks and then moved onto the business side where whe is running a fairly significant program.  Toda

In many conversations you often wonder why different people have different perception of what was said.  I have often found that after a good conversation about an issue during a performance review; later the understanding seems to have been lost.   How come we no longe

As part of my insights into the consulting process, I realized that the report is not the product of a consulting assignment but part of the change process.  Remember people only do what they are ready to do, even consultants.  On difficult assignments we often want to produ

I was involved in a huge systems development project a while ago that was a disaster.  I will describe the project and try to analyse why a strong believer in the breakthough approach abandoned it completely. Description of the Problem A large intergrated steel mill was producing

I once worked on a project where the program and project managers would compulsively lie to the client.  Since then I have had to work with other people who deliberately mislead their clients.  I find it disturbing.  While I can’t say I am without sin in this depa

Welcome to the 13th Episode of the CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X. Today we have the opportunity to chat with two people, Robert Shaffer of Robert H. Shaffer and Associates and Jim Hayward of Project X.  Jim and Bob have known each other for a while and when Jim and I st

Recently I noticed a comment asking about the purposes of the Blogs on the Project X site.  As far as my contributions are concerned, I want to share some of our experinces in the consulting business and demonstrate some of the philosophy of Project X.  I like to think that