Motivating Your Team

Just about every project management job description entails “motivating people who do not report to you”.  It’s clearly important, but how can you do it well?  The key is encouraging rather than squashing your team’s inherent self-motivation.  

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Inspire…Challenge…Transform: some definitely do it all!

Phil Messina, a project manager at HP, volunteered to document the PMI Norcal Symposium 2008. Here is his report.

Randy Englund, Content and Program Director, www.englundpmc.com

On September 3rd and 4th, nearly 300 project management professionals settled into the Stanford University Faculty Club meeting room in Palo Alto, California, for the NorCal 2008 PMI Symposium. Speakers and registrants from Hawaii to Spain attended the event, with the bulk of participants coming from the greater Central California area.

Attendees, shuttled to the Faculty Club from an outlying Stanford campus parking lot, stoically braved room air conditioning problems, exacerbated by hotter-than-normal August temperatures, to experience what was promised by the Symposium’s theme: inspire…challenge…transform. And it was worth it!

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Culture of Attrition vs. Culture of Retention

I recently worked for two very different companies: Company A, a huge, global company with a heavy reliance on contractors; and Company B, a small, regional company with a core staff that had been there for quite some time.  I was struck by the difference in my first day at each company… 

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Everything you know about project management is wrong

To someone else. Why?

Some project managers accidentally stumble into the profession. Others enter the field on purpose. Both groups tend to settle into a particular way of managing projects, and over time it seems most form specific ideas about what works and what doesn’t from their experience.

Projects in general have some similarities. (more…)

Project Progress Trend Analysis

If you are like most project managers, you wish you had a better real-time handle on the progress of your project so you could predict when you will finish or when a change is needed in order to stay on track. I have used a simple yet powerful method that is applicable to most projects and can tell you months in advance if you are off track or if scope creep is threatening to destroy your schedule. The method is straightforward and only requires a detailed task list and that the tasks are checked off as the project progresses. If you spend the time with the project team to develop a detailed work breakdown schedule (WBS), you have all the data you need for this method. WBS data should be available for even the simplest projects and is often in spreadsheet form as a simple list of tasks, making the method described here very easy to implement. The method is far easier to use to monitor progress and identify when things are going awry than either PERT or Gantt charts. Here is the method: (more…)

A Letter to Executives

In the PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 just concluded at Stanford University, Esteri Hinman, a Capability Owner at Intel’s Corporate Platform Office, included a fabulous letter to executives in her presentation.  The letter is too good–and relevant–to go unnoticed, so here it is.  Please feel free to pass it along to others who need it. (more…)

Mexican Project Management

I recently spent 4 days working in Mexico for the first time.  Eye-eye-eye!  What a place!  There wasn’t a Taco Bell in sight.  The tequila was more aromatic than the most savory brandy, and the seafood was as fresh as a daisy, served raw like the sushi in Japan, but with incredible spices and sauces that made the flavors bounce out of my mouth and do a samba dance on my tongue.  This was an eye-opening experience for me because I previously have only been a tourist in Mexico, soaking up the sun and indulging in a margarita or two.  Get ready, world, Mexico is becoming a center of technical excellence for software development! (more…)