The Project Coach

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…

Well, I am late posting this blog because I couldn’t decide what to write about!  You know what I am talking about – analysis paralysis, the bane of all project managers. › 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…

In last week’s article, Susan discussed the emotions involved when a project is terminated, “back burnered” to death, or mercifully euthanized.  But what about those projects that don’t or can’t get cancelled when they should?  Whether due to mandatory regulatory requirements, or being beyond the point of no return some projects simply leave us no choice – they must be finished.  Managing a troubled project to prevent it from becoming a failed project, and then turning it around and steering it back to a successful project requires super star skills.  Typically project specialists at the highest end of the project management spectrum are brought in as an outsider for these jobs to function as a special recovery project manager.  › Continue reading…

So the project is finally finished, the customer has accepted the deliverables, and the documentation has been finished up and handed off.  Ready to go off to the next big adventure?  Not so fast.  Before you disband the team, and lose all that knowledge they have about the last so many months you’ve all toiled together, be sure to hold a lessons learned session.  A Lessons learned session, or post mortem, as it is sometimes called, is typically held › 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…

The premier of the third season of Celebrity Apprentice certainly provided lots of grist for the gristmill and the portent of intriguing things to come. 

Several themes emerged during the first episode, which had the teams (divided by gender) run a New York diner for a few hours: 

• Cindi Lauper was an ineffective leader for the women’s team and Holly Robinson Peete demonstrated the concept of “emergent leadership” in the vacuum left in Lauper’s wake. 
• Bret Michaels, › Continue reading…

In the hectic pace that can set in on projects, in spite of our best intentions in the beginning, we often find ourselves racing frantically through the end of one phase of work right into the next – especially if we’re a wee bit behind schedule and need to catch up.  Don’t do it!  Take the time to stop and assess the work effort in a tollgate phase review.   Neglecting to get formal stakeholder approval of the work can backfire later in the project. › Continue reading…

As with all things, preparing for a successful outcome with communications and public relations on a project starts with a good plan.  Creating a communication plan for your project helps you identify who your stakeholders are and what the unique communication requirements are of each constituency.  If you have stakeholders in different locations who will participate in meetings, › Continue reading…