Terry Little

By Terry Little In essence, project management is about people. Virtually every successful project is defined by good relations between the people involved.

By Terry Little Recently, I changed jobs. I moved from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where I had worked for 30 years managing programs, to a newly created job in Washington, D.C. as the Director of the Air Force Acquisition Center of Excellence (whatever that means!).

By Terry Little I am struck by how often failure is blamed on a lack of discipline. You often hear losing coaches cite this as the reason for a big loss.

One day, on an impulse, I asked the 80 or so folks working for me the following question in a staff meeting: “Say I was to line up everyone here by the degree to which each person was pulling his or her weight in supporting the overall team; where would you be in the line?

By Terry Little I suggest all project and program managers consider publishing a newsletter about their programs or projects for their team members.

By Terry Little Most managers I know think that constructing a schedule is primarily a technical activity. I have found over the years that creating a realistic schedule for a complex project is mostly an art — one requiring lots of intuition, judgment and guesswork.

By Terry Little Prelude to a Mistake I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career, but the one that I think of as providing the greatest learning opportunities occurred while I was program manager of a large Department of Defense (DoD) project designated by Congress as an acquisition reform program.

Many managers are afraid to do unorthodox things. You’re not. How do you get away with it?

By Terry Little When I was a young project manager, my boss pulled me into his office to tell me I needed to convert our cost-reimbursable development contract to fixed price.