Category Archives: communication

Seth Godin, guru of everything?

Okay, no one is the guru of everything, but I find Seth to be great at posing questions and giving just a bit of an answer. this post is a good example. Change is difficult. Mostly because it is complex and there are too many reasons why it fails. But, the way people act is a huge factor.

If you can’t figure out how the positive people are feeling, you will focus on the verbal negative people. Continue reading

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5 steps to more effective communication

Communication has been on my mind all week. I am working with two clients who are located out of town. I travel to their sites frequently but I do a lot of work with them over the phone and by email. It means I really have to know what the communication needs to accomplish before I start. Continue reading

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Success Measures – try a new approach?

Hi, we all have our set success criteria for projects: on or under budget, on time, within scope. But, what if you made one new criterion every project. Continue reading

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Status reports – useful or not?

I’ve been reading a number of posts on LinkedIn and other blogs about status reports and why they don’t work. Most of theses are promoting a different model for status reporting. The problem is not with a format of reporting, but with the process of reporting. Continue reading

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Communication Plans, the key to project success

It may be too much to say a communications plan is the key to success, but certainly not having one is going to cause everyone much unneeded stress. This communication plan is not the internal plan of status reporting, issue resolution and periodic updates, it’s for your stakeholders whoever they may be. Continue reading

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The Art of Project Management

Have you ever watched a PM be successful without an apparent methodology? Is this an example of good project management or lucky project management? Continue reading

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Asking the right questions

I have been looking on LinkedIn a lot lately and trying to answer some of the questions raised in discussions. I found it hard to give a useful suggestion most of the time because the question was not asked with enough context.

Asking questions is a skill. For a consultant, PM or a business analyst, it’s a critical skill. Continue reading

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Mergers, successful transition

I’ve worked on four successive credit union mergers and each time we developed looser success criteria. The reason we did this is integration and success on mergers is complicated and we found the tighter you tried to control it, the less successful we became.
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Informal Communication, the one key project tool

The value of communication for the project manager goes beyond the communication plan. It is the one key success tool for any PM. Continue reading

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Communication plans and actions

Can you have too much communication? The usual answer is no. But, I’ll put a caveat on that answer. No, you can’t have too much of the right communication. Yes, it’s easy to have too much of the wrong communication. Continue reading

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