Leaderhip

Where to Go From Here?
I realize that most of us will never face the challenges confronted by Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director, on Apollo 13, but the mental exercise is worth doing.  If you haven’t seen the movie, or have seen it and view it as entrainment at the time, I suggest renting it and [...]

Rallying the Team from a Bump in the Night
For the rare situation where the project plan comes to an abrupt, premature end or dead stop, it is your time to show everyone what real leadership is.  At this point the whole team, and more, are looking for someone to rally them and provide direction on [...]

Process for Handling the Dips in the Road

The majority of unexpected situations that hit a project during its execution are dips in the road to closure; a leader can certainly prepare both themselves and a process for the team, to deal with these.
As the project leader you own the solution/decision process, like any of [...]

Who is Solving the Problems and Making the Decisions?
The question on the table is, will we have the right person(s) solving the problem and/or making the decision, when needed?
The volume of problems/decisions seen by a project is probably somewhat pyramid in shape, with the bulk lying with individual SMEs and, hopefully, precious few with the [...]

Are you prepared to cope when things go bump in the night?
As project managers we have become proficient in transforming the project charter (in whatever form we get it) into a project plan (hopefully, including some risk management) and then charging through plan execution to closure.  But, what happens when thing go bump in the [...]

I just returned from hearing Carly Fiorini (former CEO of HP) speak at Celebrity Forum. She defined leaders as those who made change – who see an opportunity and seize the opportunity.
Leaders have the vision to make changes.  Managers deliver within a set of (I can’t think of her word but mine is – parameters.)  Leaders [...]

Think about Google and Net Apps.  Now think about the Ritz-Carlton Resort-Hotel Chain, Best Buy, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Wynn Hotels.  What do they all have in common?
It’s how they treat their people.

Technorati Tags: building_relationships, common-sense, everyone-wins, Interpersonal, Leaderhip, management-theory, Professional-Development, soft-skills, What-really-works

I’m sure you have had a chance to write a vision or mission statement at one time or another in your career. In my 25 years in high-tech corporate life, I’ve seen hundreds. Unfortunately, most of them were poorly written because the authors failed to capture the true goal of a vision statement, and missed [...]

A mentor of mine once attributed this quote to General George Patton. I don’t know for sure if Patton said this first, but I do know that these are words for every Program/Project Manager to live by. I’m not saying that running a program is equivalent to waging war, although it may seem that way [...]

Does your team seem to be allergic to process?  Have you been trying to implement project management best practices and meeting resistance? 
If so, have you addressed your team’s inherent questions, like “How will this make my life better?” and “Is that improvement enough to merit the hassle of changing?”  Have you explained how this will [...]

Deliverables-based project management, or as Timm Esque, author of “No Surprises Project Management”, calls it “Commitment-based” project management, makes tracking of deliverable completion relatively easy. Rather than worrying about the task details, the PM worries about the status of the deliverable. And here are a few rules I apply:
1. It is either “done” [...]

So, what happens during map day? Yesterday I gave a quick overview of the process but now it is time to provide more details.
The objectives of a map day can vary depending on where a project is. At the beginning, it is a way for all team members to get to know each other and [...]

How do we communicate PM’s Intent? Here’s an idea.

Project leadership vs. project management: it’s time to apply more leadership and less management!

Managing projects, as I keep repeating, is about managing people and problems.  I have a great example of a manager who handled a customer situation ideally.  I was the customer.

Technorati Tags: best-practices, crisis, customer-service, Execution, Leaderhip, real-world, treating-people-well

I serve on the board of an organization seeking grant funds.  They formed a committee.  The committee meets weekly and weekly and weekly – and when I recently asked about hte progress of their grant requests I was told that they finally decided to work with a Yahoo group and some Google tool.  Meeting after meeting took place with [...]

The more I think and learn about project management the more I realize I had it all wrong in my early days of beating my head against the wall to get my projects completed within the triple constraints.  Being an accidental project manager with no formal training and also being from an engineering background pointed me [...]

Hi everyone, this is the end of my tour of duty as guest blogger.  I wanted to end with some thoughts about the importance of the relationships we develop with peers, bosses, customers, vendors, team members and anyone else with whom we have contact.  It’s all about how people feel they are being treated by [...]

Mordred – the ultimate betrayer – like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Mordred turned people against each other.  We were talking about Mordred, betrayal, and Camelot at a meeting tonight of the Silicon Valley Innovative Institute’s Society.  During the discussion, I realized that the two people I’ve caused to be fired in all [...]

If you’ve never played in a drum circle you really owe it to yourself to find one in your local area and check it out. It’s a fabulous metaphor for shared control in project management. You see, a drum circle is a self-organizing system and is usually without a recognized leader. I [...]