Get Your BUT Out of the Way!

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 thinking about the dark side. (more…)

Knowing Is Not Enough

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 about every diet there is, my scale tells me that the knowledge alone isn’t very useful… (more…)

The Power of Questions

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?”

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Whose Legs Are You Dancing On?

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?

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Rich Project Manager, Poor Project Manager

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 than others. Why is that? Why can’t I be like that? Maybe we should start thinking like an Investment Banker. (more…)

!@#%$%! = Team Bonding?

“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?

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“Vivo Per Lei”

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. (more…)