"The danger of the single story"- Chimamanda Adichie

You know that I've blogged before about the danger of PMs taking a single-point estimate. I want to draw your attention to a nice talk given by Chimamanda Adichie (shown on the left) called, "The Danger of the Single Story".

I'd like to acknowledge Pervez Mohammed of VISIONS non-profit group for making me aware of this video.

It takes the idea of a single-point estimate to a whole new level.

Listen to her. The video is about 20 minutes and is located HERE.

Then think. Or maybe reflect is a better word here. Think about using this as you identify risks, as you build your teams, as you take inputs from contributors. Don't rely on one source. As a PM you need to be unbiased and open to wider sources of information and willing to listen to alternate versions.

This talk may help you with that.

Enjoy.

Bored --> Board --> Exciting

Today, I'm very happy to announce that I've become a Distributor for a tremendous product that brings fun, intrigue, and yes, even thrills to the world of learning about project management. Thus the image above.

Project management learning should be a little more like that, don't you think? Well, it can be, with a board game that takes project managers on a bit of a roller-coaster ride through a project and teaches them about risk and much more.

The board game, which was carefully developed over a nine year period by Kay Wais at Successful Projects can now be obtained via my company, Exclaim!PM.

See the press release HERE.

This game and supporting materials - although focused on project risk management - really uses the "churning is learning" philosophy that Kay and I agree is so basically important to the way adults learn about project management in general.



I plan to use adopt it in my series of courses that make up a Master's Certificate in PM, and if you are an educator or student of PM and would like to do the same, please contact me for information and availability of the materials.



Here's a picture of the game:




















There's a video of the game here.



For more about the game, contact me directly at exclaim@verizon.net

Thanks!

Free WBS tool for download

Here's a very small program with a very specialized task: make quick work out of genrating a WBS.

It's free, fairly intuitive, and does its task well.

Check it out here:


http://www.wbs-tool.net/