I’m in class all-day today (yes, Saturday - yuck) learning about project management with Microsoft Project.

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The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge was mentioned in my Role of the Project Manager class, as a good resource about goal misalignment.

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This was mentioned by the teacher in my project management class. The two theories describe hypothetical and conflicting ways in which people are motivated to work.

Theory X and Theory Y

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I’ll have to check this out when I have some more time:

The Project Management Pocketbook

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Another term mentioned in Thursday’s project management class. Here are some links that I found on it:

• Wikipedia
• c2.com Wiki
• arl.org

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Just downloaded OpenWorkbench - a free, open source alternative to Microsoft® Project.

From a very cursory glance, it looks pretty sophisticated, although I haven’t really tried to use it or compare it to Microsoft Project yet. Hopefully, I’ll have some time to play with it and see what it can do.

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The teacher of my Project Management class, Mike Taylor, mentioned “Gresham’s Law of Planning” in last night’s class and told us to look it up. It turns out that the original Gresham’s Law was actually penned by economist Thomas Gresham and had everything to do with economics and nothing to do with planning - in short, it said “bad money drives out good money”. Later, some folks interested in project planning and time management saw an analogous principle with regards to time management and decided to call it Gresham’s Law of Planning. The best description of it that I could find with a quick web search came from here and it said:

An important principle of Organisation design that relates to managerial decision making is Gresham’s Law of Planning. This law states that there is a general tendency for programmed activities to overshadow non-programmed activities. Hence, if a series of decisions are to be made, those that are more routine and repetitive will tend to be made before the ones that are unique and require considerable thought. This happens presumably because you attempt to clear the desk so that you can get down to the really serious decisions. Unfortunately, the desks very often never get cleared.

In other words, you never get done the things you most want to get done, because life is a never-ending stream of interruptions.

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