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…
Tag: project team meetings
Do you understand the difference between consensus and compromise? The words sound alike but the distinction is important.
I recently attended a conflict resolution class lead by Judy Mares-Dixon, a well known mediator and designer of dispute resolution systems for organizations around the world. Our class spent a lot of time discussing compromise versus consensus. › 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…