Tag Archives: leadership

Team burnout

A short post today because I’m suffering a bit from team burnout. It’s been a while since I’ve been here and I wondered how many project managers forget that teams get burned out and they need time to recover.

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People skills and your inner voice

Have you ever wondered why that team member suddenly causes you more problems when you have less time to deal with them?

It’s not them. 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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Gathering requirements is it ever complete?

The dream of gathering absolutely complete requirements is just that, a dream.You will find no matter how detailed or complete, or ‘approved as final’ your rquirements are, things will change. That isn’t a failure of the requirements, it’s a fact of project mangagement. If you try to perfect the beginning, you’ll never start your developement or build phase. Continue reading

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How do you add value to your client?

One of the questions that comes up on discussion boards and with clients is what does the Project Manager do? I have to say I’ve had my struggles in answering this question in the past. I’ve been chatting with clients … Continue reading

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Issue management or Firefighting

The challenge for Project Managers is to keep the project moving through challenges – or identify when the project shouldn’t keep moving forward. If the PM is skilled in issue management they can navigate the daily issues (or hourly issues) on any project. If they aren’t as skilled, the project goes into firefighting mode. Continue reading

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Project Management Office – why do I need one?

Most organizations that have a history of project management find themselves all over the success range from Fabulous Success to Spectacular Failure. This variety of outcomes is often the trigger for the executive to start on the PMO path. Continue reading

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Trust and delegation

Why don’t people trust? Well, I’d say the 99% of the time it’s not about thinking the person won’t do a good job – their desire and motivation, but more about the can’t – about their knowledge and ability. The can’t is where you hear things like ‘it will be faster to do it myself than show someone else’ or ‘they don’t have the experience’ or ‘they don’t have the time to learn’. Continue reading

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Dirty little project management secret

Project Managers sometime fly by the seat of their pants. Okay, now it’s out in the open. Some PMs do this all the time. They like the rollercoaster ride, they love the heroics and they see creativity in the pressures … Continue reading

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Communication – why is it so hard?

I’ve been looking around at blogs for inspiration for today’s post. It seems like communication is the topic of choice for bloggers. It is complex, even though it sounds simple. How hard is it to be clear, paraphrase for clarity, follow up, listen… and all the other tips people have out there. Continue reading

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