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…

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…

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…

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…

This week’s episode of Celebrity Apprentice offered a lesson for project managers the world over about recognizing the power of mixing up stagnant teams. 

The guys had been doing pretty well as a team and had learned to play to each other’s strengths after the first six episodes.  The women, not so much.  Cyndi’s initial flakiness has progressed to outright boorishness.  Holly continues to grate with her sledgehammer finesse.  Maria takes things too personally and Summer is the classic peacekeeper.  Sharon has been absent for the last few shows (tolerated because she is The Donald’s pet this season) so her brusqueness has been in short supply but still evident enough to ruffle a few feathers.   › Continue reading…

Is winning at all cost, despite the consequences of team trust and relationships worth the price?  That is the question we contemplate after this week’s episode of celebrity apprentice.  This week the teams were each assigned a rising country music artist, and the task was to perform an image makeover, including a press kit and media coaching to prepare the artist for an interview with “PEOPLE Country Magazine” and a live concert.  › 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…

Week 2 of celebrity apprentice was another star studded showdown, where the teams began to move past the usual team dynamics of forming, through to storming.  Last week things were so cordial that when the women were in the boardroom, Donald was reduced to vulgarity out of frustration because they wouldn’t throw each other under the bus.  This week, we began to see some of the personality conflicts staging as the stress of the task set in. 

› Continue reading…