Anuradha Subramanian

The much-debated ‘Lessons Learned’ process is worthy of a mention in this series. It is one of the most important aspects of project management and organization leadership in my opinion. A leader’s commitment to the success of projects, their people, and the company, is demonstrated to a large extent by their ability to learn from past [...]

There are times when a company that was poised for success and destined for glory, fizzles and fades into the background. The money was there, the concept was saleable, and customers were clamoring for their offering. But something went wrong. So what was it? The answer – the management team!
The fact that a leader can [...]

My first post in this series described one of the most important leadership lesson I learned - to allow your team members to become better leaders themselves by simply getting out of their way.
One way to support that effort is, when there is a problem, to resist the urge to jump into the fray and come up [...]

Several years ago, I found myself on a team that was in the clutches of a controlling and overbearing project leader who quickly sapped the team of all its creativity and enthusiasm. I then began to systematically scribble notes to myself on all the things I would never do when I became a project leader [...]

We’ve all had to surmount project communication challenges at some point in our job functions. We are in a world of globally dispersed teams where we sometimes never get to see each other. Naturally, email communication is often deemed a convenient method to get messages across without having to work around team schedules. However, a badly [...]

Have you seen soccer teams come together? Soccer is very much a team sport. Players use their individual talents to advance the ball towards the goal, but ultimately pass to others on their team who are in a better position to score. In doing so, they sacrifice their moment in the spotlight for the good of [...]

It’s that time of year! About now, most companies embark upon a yearly performance appraisal process to provide feedback, deliver praise or criticism, and set the stage for the upcoming year(s). This is a somewhat rigid and heavily scrutinized HR activity. What can a leader do to motive their teams outside the confines of this process? Here [...]

Can the perfect process weather the perfect storm ?
In the first two parts of this series we saw what the mechanics are of introducing processes and how processes can be tailored to your project(s). So now you’ve got the perfect process, but you’re still not meeting timelines or quality and performance objectives ! Why ? More often [...]

I’ve seen too many examples of good process initiatives that went wrong because there just wasn’t a an effort to match the process with a project. Below are examples of process intiatives that went wrong -
1) Organization-wide processes that only work for certain project types. Would you use the same hammer or spanner for different DIY projects ? Probably not. It’s a good idea to [...]

The task of managing project processes usually falls upon the project management organization. This, in my opinion, is a good thing. The project leaders have the the ear of the management team, the trust of the project teams, and a unique cross-functional perspective.
I was once asked by the CTO of an engineering organization to help him design the “RIGHT” project process for his [...]

Have you ever worked for someone who said ALL requirements are high priority ? Yeah ! We all have. Customers often are insistent upon the delivery of a certain feature set by a certain timeline that may seem impossible to meet. If everything is high priority, nothing is !

Project teams often bear of the brunt of this indecisiveness. Impossible targets, lack [...]