Susan Scott, author of the acclaimed book Fierce Conversations, has these recommendations to help us connect through conversation:
Come into the conversation with empty hands. Bring nothing but yourself.
Set aside your own agenda and ask, “What is the most important thing we should be talking about today?”
When you ask, really ask. One of the greatest gifts [...]
In today’s limited resources and competing priorities, terminating a project which no longer advances the organization’s objectives, is a sound business decision. It takes courage and should be celebrated as success. The resources saved can be deployed where they will matter the most for the organization in the long term.
Unfortunately, terminating projects leaves behind what [...]
A project manager asked: What do you think are some key reasons why even good project managers sometimes miss getting great projects or even great career advancements?
Here is my response:
When it comes to reporting project status, project managers have to make tough decisions about what to report, when to report it, and how to report it. These decisions are more challenging during crisis situations, when careful crisis communication becomes a very sensitive component of any status reporting.
You feel the sensitive nature of crisis communication [...]
This short video shows Project Managers a simple setup of SharePoint to organize project documentation. I used this same configuration on a recent project and it worked really well. It is a very basic setup using SharePoint built-in document and list management features. Please leave a comment below and let me know how you are using SharePoint in your [...]
We spend so much of our time preparing for the success of our project but we hardly invest any time in preparing ourselves for coping with the aftermath of failure. Yet, it is inevitable that some of our projects will fail, no matter how much efforts we personally invest in them.
The reality is that every [...]
If there is one thing I learned from leading complex projects, over the last few years, it is that self confidence remains the foundation of successful project leadership.
Without self confidence, it does not matter how well we know our project management processes, as we may not have the courage to make the tough calls, discuss [...]
A project should never be approved without an official sponsor, who is willing to lobby and fight for it. Unfortunately, there are still many organizations that don’t have a decent project governance process for project selection and approval.
As project managers, we get too excited about new projects that we sometimes start work without a project [...]
Transitioning from individual contributor to project manager is one of the hardest phases of one’s career, especially for those of us with a technical background.
The habits and behaviors that made us successful in the past are unlikely to make us successful as project managers. Often, these become blind spots that we have to learn how [...]
It has taken me months to finally decide to publish my first blog post. I thought long and hard about what I wanted this blog to be about. I knew from the start that I wanted it to be about my passion for project management but I wasn’t clear on what kind of topics I [...]
