career

As Project Managers, I’m sure we’ve all seen the kind of scenario where there is a project team member who is generally uncooperative or can’t seem to get the tasks done on time – and the different approaches you can take in order to solve this problem. You can take the dictatorial “Do as I [...]

I get many questions from people who want to enter into project management as a profession. After all, my blog is pmStudent. One of the most common questions is “how do I get started”? I received an email from a reader recently with this question, and so I would like to share [...]

One question I get at least once a week is, “Why are you so involved in project management? You’re not a project manager!”
For some reason, people think of project management as a discrete occupation. You have a software upgrade? You need a new oil drilling platform? Call a project manager! [...]

Why would anyone want to be a project manager (PM)?
It’s a lot of work. It’s been said, only partly jokingly, that a PM may spend about 80% of his or her time on communication tasks, and the remaining 80% on the other required tasks.
We get a lot of responsibility and hardly any true control. [...]

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

I have come to believe that leadership is really about what you do and influence others to do, rather than primarily about a particular outward charisma..   However, I do believe that how you come across to people CAN significantly add to or substract from your effectiveness.
We ask people to do hard things – work hard, meet tough deadlines, operate in the [...]

I wanted to do my last big post on bridging from these ideas of what constitutes a great PM to what it can mean for someone’s overall career.   Of course it seems obvious that if you’re a great PM, you’ll get more opportunities.  Certainly  you’d seem like the person to call for bigger and hairier and [...]

Today I want to tackle a couple of typical questions I hear about what a great PM needs to be (or not) and do.
1)  Does a PM in a technical environment need to be “technical” themselves?
2)  Does a PM need to be a charismatic leader?  (Or what DOES it mean for a PM to be [...]

Continuing my observations on what executives value – what THEY think makes a great PM.   First, by contrast, it’s interesting to note what the job ads for project managers say.  Here’s a sampling of line items I’ve seen in such ads, covering a mix of PM skills and ‘personality attributes’:

Proficient in project planning, organizing,  team [...]

So what DO executives think of us as project managers and what do they value?   I know from conferences and other interaction with project managers that being valued by their executives is something of a holy grail – and seemingly not nearly common enough.  Thinking back, I realize that I was about 7 years into my [...]

This week I’ll be writing about what it means to be a great project manager – from the perspective of my own career and interactions with other PMs; from what i’ve heard executives say about what they value; and from the unique, interesting and opportunity-filled career paths I’ve observed and heard about specific project managers pulling off!   As [...]

I read sometime ago in some management publication (whose name I can’t recall) that project management will never be considered a profession, but rather, an inherent and necessary skill set. The premise is that most professional and non-professional people in any industry will require project management skills to do their jobs, be it CEO or pharmacist, but there will be no [...]