The Project Coach

Is this a familiar sounding scenario?  You rush through the planning phase trying to get to the answer of “when will the work be finished?”.  You throw a schedule together with meticulous detail to determine that all important date, then promptly never look at it again.  Or, you lay out the schedule according to the different teams that will be working on the project, or according to the different work life cycles, or some other scheme you think easy to update.  Then when you take your project schedule into a meeting with executive stakeholders to report on status, › Continue reading…

One of the most important responsibilities project managers have is communications.  Good project managers spend up to 90% of their time communicating.  In today’s economic business climate, in order to keep projects or engagements funded, project managers must continually “market” the positive benefits and achievements of projects – even when they are approved.  This is certainly true for high profile, publicly funded initiatives where the whims of politics come into play.  It is not uncommon in these cases for program managers to become road warriors, traveling to customer sites in order to maintain stakeholder mindshare and keep the project sold.  However, even with internal corporate projects, it can be all too easy for executives to decide to cancel them, in order to launch the latest favored initiative, unless they are constantly given good reasons not to.  › Continue reading…

By Cindy Vandersleen, PMP

One of the most common practices in many project team meetings is the classic “go around the room and collect status” from each team member.   This works quite well for the project manager because everyone is collected together and in an efficient hour’s time he/she can collect the information needed for the weekly status report.  The problem with that is that for everyone else in the room, once they have their 2-5 minutes of fame reporting their status, the rest of the time is usually irrelevant to them, so they tend to zone out, talk amongst themselves, do email, or yes, even yawn off.  › Continue reading…