Kent McDonald

Kent J. McDonald specializes in successfully applying pragmatic approaches to strategic planning and coaching business analysts and project managers. His more than 15 years of experience include work in business analysis and planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, non profit, and automotive. Kent writes a column for ProjectConnections.com about value based leadership and delivers Business Analysis training for B2T Training.

His work in the non-profit community includes serving as the Chair of 2 Central Iowa JDRF Hope Galas, Vice President of Strategic Planning, and President for the Greater Iowa chapter of Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He co-founded the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and chaired the Central Iowa Business Analyst Development Day 2009. Kent has a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Iowa State University and an MBA from Kent State University.

He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, a book that brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help organizations deliver business value and build competitive advantage.

He welcomes questions about project leadership with a focus on value at kmcdonald@projectconnections.com.

SMART Objectives Aren't Always Project-Specific
Time, Budget, and Scope -- is that really all there is to it?
Unfortunately these criteria are insufficient for measuring project success and can be misleading.
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Be Careful What You Measure, You Just Might Get It
What do you really want from your team members? Lines of code? Bugs found? Use cases? Or teamwork?
There are two sayings that are commonly used when discussing measurement and management: "You can't manage what you don't measure," and "You get what you measure."
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Risk Management Takes a Village
Risk management? Isn't that the PM's job? Don't kid yourself.
Without fail, as soon as we finish these discussions a developer, tester, or business analyst will say something like, "That's great Kent, but I don't see how risk management applies to me." Seriously?
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Collaborating with Non-Collaborators
"If you're not with me, you're against me!" Figuring out how to work with people who aren't working with you.
George claimed that he was trying to work with Simon, but that Simon was not acting in a very collaborative manner. Meanwhile, Simon kept saying that George just refused to work with him. In effect, they were labeling each other non-collaborators.
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Is Your Project AWOL (Active Without Leadership)?
What would you do if confronted with an abrupt project impact and seemingly indifferent management?
I recently caught up with a friend of mine who I had not talked to in quite a while. While we were catching up, he told me that he had recently changed jobs and that while he really liked his new one, the switch was not his choice.
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A Personal Retrospective for 2010
Want to improve the next project? Start by asking the right questions after this one.
I have covered the topic of resolutions before. In this article, I'd like to talk about an activity that is always a good way to determine what some of those resolutions should be.
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Letter to Me
What would you tell yourself if you could speak back in time to that fresh-faced youngster on their first project management gig?
Hey, Kent, congratulations on getting that new Project Management gig. If you haven't figured it out already, this is you 15 years from now. I thought I'd drop you a line…
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GoldPlater
It's easy to blame the Business Owner or the sinister conspiracy, but sometimes we're our own worst enemy.
Sure, technology can do things quickly, but if it's based on a bad process or flawed business logic, technology just produces bad results faster. Sometimes, the most elegant solutions are the simplest ones.
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Requirements for Requirements
There are better ways to write requirements about requirements than writing more requirements.
This week I found myself in a conversation that seemed surreal at the time. A data analyst had just suggested that we add a business requirement to capture metadata for all the data elements being added on a data warehouse project.
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Hawaii Uh-Oh
How to manage a successful project outcome when everything that can go wrong, does.
My wife and I were on the second of our four flights on the way to Kauai the Friday before Valentine's Day when I heard one of those things you never want to hear over the loudspeaker of an airplane.
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New Year's Resolutions for Your Project
What do wedding anniversaries, shoe size, and eye color have in common? They all point to a need for clearer project objectives.
Goals, especially those of the measurable type, are excellent ways to know when a project is successful. Having a clear idea of what problem the project is intending to solve doesn't hurt either.
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Titles and Accountabilities
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means (especially in the typical tangled project RACI chart).
In fact, there is no clear agreement on the definition of accountability, or the distinction between accountability and responsibility, and several people seem to use them interchangeably. This does no one any good, especially since the distinction between accountable and responsible is quite important.
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The DVD's of Business Ownership
Help your primary business stakeholders understand their critical role by focusing on three key activities.
Even though there shouldn't be such a thing as a Business Owner title, the role is so critical that the organization I described above did not allow a project to proceed without a specifically identified business owner.
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Show Me the (Different Kinds of) Money
The kind of money funding your project can have a huge impact on how well, or whether, it survives a cash flow crisis.
If times are good and your project is relatively small and low risk, chances are it probably isn't that relevant. Unfortunately, times are not the best right now, and there seem to be a lot of expensive, high risk, bet-the-company projects going on right now.
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Tying Projects to Organizational Strategy
Understanding why you're doing a project, and why it's important to your organization, makes decisions about how to do it much easier.
You can replicate this type of focused effort and motivation at your organization, with people paid to work on these projects, by identifying a similar tie to the organization's strategy. If you can identify what value the project adds to the business and communicate that clearly to the project team, chances are you will have a similarly motivated team.
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Keeping Up the Pace
Help your team set a work pace they could keep up forever (though hopefully the project ends a little sooner than that).
One way that marathon runners take care of themselves is to maintain a relatively consistent pace throughout the race. Some project teams follow a similar practice for pacing their work, known in one of the agile software development methods as "sustainable pace."
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Decisions, Decisions...
Postponing a decision isn't always procrastination. Sometimes it's the best call.
We were still three months out from the targeted implementation point, but there was a burning desire to make a decision NOW! Did we really need to make the decision right then?
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Teching Up a 19th-Century Pastoral Game
What baseball can teach us about technology rollouts.
There are several lessons to be learned about introducing a new process or system to a group of users from watching MLB dipping their toes in the technology pool. Because I am a big believer in learning from others' experiences, I thought I would share some of them with you.
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Running the Numbers
Budgets show how much money a project takes. Building a simple financial model shows you how they make money too.
Most project budgets are static, or are at least built to be very difficult to change. This limits the team's ability to quickly test out different scenarios based on different cost or revenue projections, which limits the information available for their decision-making.
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User Illusions
Just one customer representative to talk to, seated with the development team all the time... sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? Be careful what you ask for.
Agile advocates like to brag that one of the advantages of agile methods is that they stress regular involvement of the "customer" throughout the life of the project. Some people refer to the concept as the "single wringable neck."
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A Fool With a Tool
A tool in the right hands is powerful. But if the users haven't been properly prepared, it may creates more problems than it solves.
"If only we had a tool to do that..." And so it begins.
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Leading from Within: Supporting the Right Project Team
Projects call for several different kinds of leadership -- but only one should come from the project leader.
Let's face it, if you went to all of that work to form the right team, you would certainly hope that your work as a Project Lead was done, right? Oh, if only it were that easy. Read more ...

Picking the Right Project Team
What does the "best" development organization look like? Some key characteristics of high-performing teams.
Whenever possible, you want to make sure you have the right people on your team. So who are the right people? Read more ...

What Are We Building Again?
A concrete alternative to the usual Easter egg hunt approach to project scope statements.
For some reason, not knowing what a project is really supposed to accomplish is a common problem. Scope issues can lead to bigger problems down the road on the other two sides of that infamous Iron Triangle. Read more ...

Move Boulders, Don't Throw Pebbles
Why PMs need to sit back, bite their tongues, and learn to like the squares (for now)
Project Leaders willingly accept responsibility for protecting the team from outside distractions such as scope changes or demands from other parts of the organization. However, these same leaders often fail to realize that they can be a distraction to the team as well. Read more ...

What Is Agile, Really?
Kent McDonald discusses his Words to Lead By and the seven strategies he believes will change project management for the better.
I often find myself talking to people about agile outside of a formal presentation setting, usually in response to the infamous 'so what do you do?' question at fundraiser dinners or cocktail parties. Often, these are people who are not in the software business, so the inevitable question comes up: 'What is agile really, and can it apply outside the world of software development? Read more ...

What Does an Agile Project Plan Look Like?
Would you know an agile project plan if you saw one? Kent McDonald compares agile planning practices to traditional PM.
These differences could very well give experienced project managers a reason to stop and think. Many of these ideas run counter to what they have been taught and have practiced for several years. Read more ...

Questions from the Field: Do Agile Projects Require Different PM Skills?
How is leading an agile project different from leading a traditional one? For one thing, you spend a lot more time carrying water.
There are several differences between Traditional projects and true Agile projects that—from a project management perspective—can best be summed up by the concept of self organization. In traditional projects, the project manager not only provides the vision of the team, but also directs and manages the team... Read more ...

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