Claude Emond is one of the founders and president of Qualiscope Enterprises, a project management consulting, coaching and training firm based in Montreal, Canada. He has degrees in chemical engineering from Canada's Royal Military College (BEng) and Montreal McGill University (MEng), a MBA from Ottawa University, workshop leadership training from Le Centre Quebecois de la PNL, and is a certified PMP. He has over 25 years experience managing major public and private projects. He teaches project risk management in the Schulich School of Business Master certificate in project management and the PMP certification revision class for PMI, Montreal He is one of the authors of the current PMI Standards for Portfolio Management. Claude can be reached at I recently gave a conference in France on “Changeboxing”. This is an approach, based on timeboxing and emerging organizational change techniques that I developed to help client organizations accelerate the implementation of new project-oriented management processes (project, program and/or portfolio management). The approach considers that “major” cultural changes are associated with implementing these processes and proposes collaborative ways to get people to agree rapidly on how, when and what they will change.
The Tale of the Bow; Learning from Gabriel
I use an “erhu” (the two-string Chinese violin) as a training aid in coaching project management to workshop participants. I started to do this while giving PMP certification revision workshops for PMI-Montreal. This is something I have been doing now for more than four years. I have also published a little website on this, in collaboration with Prof Xianghui Liu, a Chinese university professor I met on MySpace [i].
Velocity. Part 1- Introduction
E.M. Goldratt is quite well known for his “Theory of Constraints” (TOC) approach, largely popularized through two business novels: “The Goal” which introduced TOC to the world of recurring operations management and “Critical Chain”, which did the same for the world of project management. Goldratt and his followers have done it again! This time for the world of continuous improvement management. In the brand new business novel, “Velocity” [1], Dee Jacob , Suzan Bergland, from the AGI-Goldratt Institute and Jeff Cox, one of the co-authors of “The Goal”, have put together a story telling about realizing rapid and significant continuous improvement results through integrating three approaches: TOC, LEAN and Six Sigma. They call this TOCLSS. Workshops and conferences promoting Velocity and TOCLSS are popping already all over the place.
Exercising Necessary Project Leadership When the Time Comes
Most of the projects I am involved with nowadays are organisational change projects, many related to the implementation of a true project management culture and all its relevant processes, behaviours and tools.
I use a "user-centric", self-organizing, collaborative approach I call "changeboxing", that I developed specifically for these types of projects. It is a mixture of agile project management "timeboxing" techniques and collaborative implementation approaches. It is based on voluntary work by concerned stakeholders of projects in an organisation, following an internal diagnosis where these stakeholders identify and confirm the organisational change they desire, and then work together to make it happen.
Paradigm shifts. The True Nature of Successful Project Teams; Everyone is a Sponsor
Not too long ago, there was an article published in Project Times about the role of a project sponsor and his/her relationship with the other project team members, "Project Sponsor as Core Team Member". I differ very much with the opinion presented in this article, as it perpetuates a vision of team work that, for me, has nothing to do with the true nature of the relationships that exist between the many stakeholders who journey together in a project, nowadays. It perpetuates a vision of "project order" that does not seem to be in line with the new 'chaordic' paradigm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaordic) that has emerged at the beginning of the 1990s and that is now accepted, by a majority of managers and employees I meet, as "how the world really works now".