The Project Coach

The Art of War Room

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

 Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space.  › Continue reading…

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share.  › Continue reading…

Let’s start with a definition of social media.  According to Wikipedia  (and that’s an obvious place to go for information about this topic) “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues.” The last part of that explanation is really powerful for project managers, as we strive to turn monologues into dialogues.  › Continue reading…

Since we are on the topic of troubled projects, I started thinking about what has now been branded the Deepwater Horizon Response Project.  This situation has similarities to many project calamities one might encounter in the course of dealing with internal or external customer organizations.  A customer organization messes up, BIG TIME, and you have to step in and turn it around. 

In this case, the project manager is retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is in charge of the federal government’s response to the oil spill resulting from the April 20^th explosion at one of British Petroleum’s (BP) offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.  › Continue reading…

It’s the end of the 2^nd Quarter and the first half of the year, and for many organizations, it’s a time when projects and programs are reviewed and analyzed.  Some will ultimately be nurtured:  more money, resources, attention, whatever the scare resource is.  Other projects and programs will not fare so well and will be terminated outright or “back-burnered” to death. › Continue reading…

In her blog last week , Cindy Vandersleen talked about the challenges of gathering requirements and how the devil is always in the details.  I think many people would agree with this assessment; I know I do.  My best practice for gathering a comprehensive set of project requirements is to build a Requirements Template, and this week I’d like to share with you some tips for creating a model that your organization can use again and again to collect a comprehensive set of requirements and manage scope creep from the word “GO”.  › Continue reading…

We all know that developing the project team is a responsibility of the project manager.  In broad strokes, we know that “developing the project team improves the people skills, technical competencies, and overall team environment and project performance”. (Project Management Book of Knowledge, 4^th Ed., pg 230).  

We know that it’s important to put some effort into the team dynamics.  We plan team building activities, and can find a plethora of ideas on how to use team building events to improve communication, build trust and learn to solve problems and make decisions as a group.  If you have ever been lucky enough to engage is some high quality team-building exercises, you know that they really can provide some value.   And sometimes we hold team-building exercises as a way to reward the team for hard work and a job well done – just a chance to let people who have toiled together, through moments of panic and hours of boredom, kick back and have some fun. 

But in the heat of the battle, it’s easy to forget that the project manager actually has a responsibility to develop the individual project team members.  › Continue reading…

Well, it finally happened.  Cyndi Lauper was finally fired.  She has been a terrible disappointment all season, and it finally caught up with her. 

Cyndi served as project manager twice, losing once and winning once.  In Episode 1, she led the women’s team, Tenacity, in their first loss in the diner challenge.  I had expected her to be a really strong contender, and was very surprised by her miserable performance in that task.  During that episode, she demonstrated that she was not able to manage the work of other people and I blogged about how she never really “got” the point of the challenge, which was to raise money for charity.  She instead focused on running a diner, and did that badly as well.  The men’s team, Rocksolid, focused on raising money and trounced the ladies.  › Continue reading…

After five episodes, the stress of the show is taking its toll on both teams.  The ladies are not nearly as courteous as they were when they started, and are eager to comply when The Donald  sets them up to throw each other under the bus in the Board Room.  The guy’s team, no longer forming or storming, has moved on to norming, the stage where team members adjust their behaviors to the team dynamics. In this week’s episode, Curtis provided strong leadership for Rocksolid.  After weeks of watching Bret dither, Curtis managed him well and led the men’s team to their first win after a string of losses to Tenacity.  › Continue reading…

This week’s Celebrity Apprentice was an object lesson for just how badly people can handle conflict.  Women are particularly guilty of avoiding conflict so they won’t have to hurt anyone’s feelings. 

Cyndi Lauper has consistently been a distraction to her team in the first three episodes of Celebrity Apprentice.  Several of her team members on Tenacity, the women’s team, have whined about her in their camera confessionals.  › Continue reading…