Soft Skills

By Mala Devlin • February 4th, 2010

Sometimes, you have to break the rules to get things done!
As we go through our lives we are subjected to numerous rules – as kids, as students, as workers and as adults living our everyday lives.  As program managers and leaders, part of our responsibilities is to lay down some rules by which to guide [...]

Dear Diary –
Well, it’s been quite a week.  After 7 days of heightened attention on my interpersonal communication skills I can’t say I feel I’ve made much progress.  Aside from some encouraging email from a few friends cheering me on in my (decades old) quest to improve myself, there’s no indication that a complete transformation [...]

Dear Diary -
In the “Dear Diary #2” blog I made a commitment to re-engineer my relationship with my dad – getting unstuck from the past conversation swirling around in my head about him.  (Perhaps you made a similar commitment to doing that with a colleague or boss after reading that blog?)  After recognizing that the [...]

Dear Diary -
Well, I might have gone overboard with my focus on possibility thinking and commitment to action in conversations…  So far this week I’ve envisioned 3 outrageous breakthroughs for myself, arm-twisted 7 friends or relatives to swear an oath to manifesting their own ridiculous goals, and committed myself to a half dozen preposterous projects [...]

Dear Diary -
For Christmas one of my closest friends gave me a dish towel that says “Being unstable and b-tchy is just part of my mystique.”  Knowing that there is truth in sarcasm, and understanding the importance of good communication skills and positive relationships to project success, I’ve decided to recommit myself to improving my [...]

With many thanks to Carrie Underwood for singing this beautiful song, it seems fitting during this holiday season to reflect upon the lyrics and apply them to our world of project management:
What you got if you ain’t got love
the kind that you just want to give away
It’s okay to open up
go ahead and let the [...]

How a team feels impacts its productivity and business results.  Imagine if the acrobat above was having a bad day… the results would be disastrous!
A key ingredient that shapes team effectiveness is its culture and having a sense of community.
Geography plays a huge role in shaping culture. Communities that live together use a common language, [...]

There is a central theme running through my Project Leadership Thoughts: it is impossible to look at a project as an isolated entity. It’s about people and interactions. And interactions happen throughout the entire social network. Every interaction effects another one.
What does this mean for you, as a professional?
You have to work on [...]

Yelling “Self promotion, Baby” is a little over the top, isn’t it?
I love rhetoric. I enjoy Big Stories. Without Too Much Detail. As Too Much Detail ruins a Good Big Story.
Although I sometimes say things excited and full of passion (”you need to…”), it’s always an invitation to look at the information and consider [...]

Why should people want to work on your project?
You know about globalization, you know this makes employees competing with people from all over the world. Have you considered The Other Consequence? That you have to compete with other GLOBAL companies and Project Managers to get good people to staff your projects?
If developers, testers and [...]

If your are into software project management, you are into “marketing”. If you are planning to keep on working in (software) projects in the years to come, you better get good at it.
It seems to be a dirty word among technical people: “marketing”. But it’s not about selling your soul to the devil. It’s not [...]

We are working with people from all over the world. Globalization goes together with an increase in transparency of reputations. The Internet introduced deadly transparency.
With an increase in geographical and cultural distance the aspect of “trust” becomes all important. When people have never met, there are two mechanism we can fall back on: [...]

Let’s continue to LEAD, albeit backwards…The other day I wrote about Delegation.  Today, let’s focus on Act and Encourage.  Sometimes, a little fog is good for team climate…

I had the opportunity to speak at the PMI Congress this year.  My presentation, called Expected Behaviors for Project Team Performance:  Road Rules, Not Road Rage introduced a set of ‘good behaviors” for teams to consider and an easy way to enable team members to reduce the “noise” which occurs among team members.

I had a great time in Orlando recently for the 2009 PMI North America Global Congress. The PMI New Media Council did a presentation titled “Why Should You Care About Social Media?”.
Bas De Baar (ProjectShrink), Cornelius Fitchner (PMPodcast), and I (pmStudent) collaborated for our segment of the presentation, focused on demonstrating the use of [...]

Dealing with Ambiguous Situations
Ambiguous situations are usually characterized by conflicting signals, signals intertwined with background noise, disconnection between actions and events, and suspension of expected cause-effect relationship.  We are in the reaches of complexity, non-linearity, and/or discontinuities; our cognitive biases don’t fit, the situation doesn’t align with any of our mental frames, we can’t recall [...]

One recent morning I was enjoying the company of my peers at the monthly PMI-Silicon Valley Chapter’s PMO Breakfast meeting.  As usual the conversation had degraded (a hardware perspective) to a discussion of software methodologies, that day specifically: When using Agile, how do you handle …?  Then out of the blue one of the participants [...]

The approach to Risk Management can also be used for Opportunity Management by using a different point of view.

Having just attended the well-attended PMI Risk Symposium a couple of weeks ago, this topic is so appropriate for our current economic environment.  Many of you are doing some type of Risk Management already.  What I hope to do is to provoke your thoughts that could help increase your project or program success.
There were SO [...]

My esteemed colleague Natalie Udo’s post a few weeks ago, “What is a Project Manager?” started me thinking about what are the elements which make us successful in the business. And hopefully, I’m reinforcing Kimberly Wiefling’s recent posts on what are the keys to success as a project leader… and not being too redundant – Thanks, [...]

One of the reasons I got into Project Management in the first place is that I’ve always been interested in people – their personalities, where they are from, what makes them tick.
Growing up overseas in Japan, I attended an international school for foreigners, and there were kids from all over the world – kids whose [...]