Archive for December 2007

This article was put together by Janet Liao in the February 2007 edition of PM Network, in the “Best of Congress Papers” feature. This is about work done by Laura Aziz, Ph.D., PMP and Bruce Woerner, PMP on PMO maturity. I really enjoyed the model they use, with 4 components and 4 life [...]

As the guest blogger for the switch from 2007 to 2008, I wanted to do a series of posts looking back over 2007. This week you will see my “Best of PM Network”, reviewing the articles and features that struck me to be “kinda cool”. My methods of determining what’s “kinda cool” are mysterious, [...]

Rosemary Hossenlopp, MBA PMP © 2007 All Rights Reserved
If you don’t want the project manager same job you had last year, you need to plan differently this year. So make a new years resolution to create a project management development plan.
What Do I Focus On?
In the last blog, you identified success factors that are your [...]

Rosemary Hossenlopp, MBA PMP © 2007 All Rights Reserved
We all want to be experts in our project management field. What gets us recognized?
Success Factors Make Your Success Happen
Success factors are key activities you need to do to make your future happen. Success factors are things that must happen for career advancement to occur. These drive [...]

Rosemary Hossenlopp, MBA PMP © 2007 All Rights Reserved
We discussed in Part One how to be hired by clients and loved by your bosses. Now we talk about what makes you thrive in your project management position.
A Personal Vision Statement Formula
Your personal vision statement will consist of what you are known for and what atmosphere [...]

Rosemary Hossenlopp, MBA PMP
 My desire is that project managers will find clarity in discussing what is important for them and create a vision to help them, their families, communities and organizations meet the challenges of the New Year with wisdom, grace, and joy.
What are your holiday greetings for the UCSC project management community? Please add [...]

Rosemary Hossenlopp, MBA PMP © 2007 All Rights Reserved
Project managers increase the chance of project failure by not planning project work. You have heard the saying “Plan the Work and Work the Plan.” It is true for career planning too. Project managers limit their personal success and growth by failing to plan their careers. Layoff’s [...]

Rosemary Hossenlopp, MBA PMP © 2007 All Rights Reserved
What did you talk about during your holiday parties? If you didn’t talk about your job, why not? Maybe you were avoiding the subject because your project work just isn’t s exciting as it has been in the past. Or it could be because you were stunned [...]

Perhaps it is a sign I have too much time on my hands, or I should really get a good hobby: but : I spent some time going through my mailbox with all my mails from one of my last projects and came up with the following theory: The carbon copy (cc) function [...]

You go to a doctor to get your health checked. Consider the following situations, and tell me who you trust the most…
Doctor A
A young guy, who looks like a used-car salesman, welcomes you with a stunning smile. His Hugo Boss suit fits perfectly. He offers you some Latte and invites you to sit down in [...]

To be a successful Project Manager in 2008, wear a suit, print a Gantt chart and get PMP certified. It is what everybody outside our profession seems to expect from us. We, Project Managers, radiate to the outside world our icons like Gantt Charts, two-digits precise risk assessments, large documents that seems to cover [...]

If you really want to improve your projects in 2008, the best place to start is inside your head. Who cares if you just became a Turquoise Belt Agile Master? Very impressive if you got yourself PiMP certified. If you are a true believer of one particular way of thinking about projects (agile or plan-driven) [...]

I just finished reviewing the notes from last week’s Agile Open California conference retrospective: what an amazing journey!  One of the many interesting discoveries was the fact that it was almost exactly 9 months from conception of the conference to delivery: some cycle times just can’t be improved on!

Technorati Tags: agile, project-management, Retrospectives

What’s the most important thing you do that makes you a good project manager?  The only contest I ever won was answering that question. 

Technorati Tags: agile, agile-leadership, career, Leadership, management, project-manager-role

How can you stay positive in your approach to project management work when you need to spend so much of your time on what has gone wrong, is going wrong or might go wrong?   The PMBOK®, for example, has 11 Monitoring and Control processes, as well as the whole Risk Management Knowledge Area to keep you [...]

Here’s one of those really good (and at the same time really irritating) questions to ask yourself – why is it that I know so much more than I actually do when I want to be successful at something?  This time of year always reminds me that even though I know the plan for just [...]

Why are questions so powerful?  Because the beginnings of change are in the questions we ask, and the best thing we can ask is often “What is the question I should be asking?”

Technorati Tags: change, communication, koans, Leadership, Lessons Learned, questions, Retrospectives

Am I weird or what?  The way I lead my life and my project management practices are so intertwined that it’s sometimes hard to tell whose legs I’m dancing on!   Cross-pollination of work and life outside of work (different from work-life balance) is a fact: are you leveraging it or letting it leverage you?

Technorati Tags: [...]

Even after the 5 stages of team formation, as project managers, we still find people not being able to work together well, ourselves included. We have to deal with sponsors, stakeholders, team members and C level management. There is no question that some people can get things accomplished, issues resolved much easier, more successful [...]

“To err is human, to forgive divine”, therefore is cursing and swearing considered an acceptable human err in a workplace? In my past 12 years as a program manager, cursing and swearing have never being absent in all my projects. But as a project manager, where do you stand on this?

Technorati Tags: communication, diversity, [...]

During an intermission of Andrea Bocelli’s concert tonight, I was comparing his concert tour project manager job to my own high tech project execution. How much difference, how big of a headache would it be and would I want to do it, I asked myself.

Technorati Tags: cross-functional-teams, customer-centric, Program-Management