Where does the resistance lie? Design Thinking lists three conditions that must be met for a product to succeed: desirability – developing new, desirable products; feasibility – overcoming internal challenges to produce the product; and viability – engaging customers. Design Thinking relies on iteration – what project managers refer to as progressive elaboration – to…
To be innovative means to venture into the unknown. Design Thinking is the ideal technique for this, because it doesn’t expect a perfect plan at the outset. In fact Design Thinking is in many ways a rejection of the project planning mindset. How can we reconcile planning with innovation? A great clue lies in the…
My course is now live In my day job I support University faculty members. In part this means helping them get their courses online. It’s a fascinating endeavour and one I always wanted to try. Now at last I have created my own online course on using Design Thinking to increase project success. This is…
My favorite subject Long ago I met a woman in a bar. True story. So far. She told me that she worked on a stud farm and that her job was to help horses mate. Still a true story. I was excited to be talking to a woman in a bar about my favorite subject…
Is Design Thinking a fad? If you have been employed in a large organization you have seen management trends come and go. First we centralize, then decentralize. First we organize functionally, then divisionally – ooh, then in a matrix with dotted lines! You could be forgiven, then, if you thought all this hype around Design…
Project management Earlier on this site I described project management as an unceasing parade of details. Others describe project management in more glowing terms: “Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.” From…
Too many bricks Les Terrasses de la Chaudière is a complex of government office buildings built in 1978 on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river across from Canada’s capital. One of my favourite engineering courses at Carleton University was taught by a project manager on the Chaudière project. Unfortunately I don’t remember his name,…