I realize this is a quote from Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” This one came to mind due to a recent post I saw on Twitter and it hit me that this is perfectly oriented toward project…
I realize we often don’t get to deal with the fantasy world much in project management. If we did, none of my projects would ever have issues, all would have customers that would agree with everything I presented, and none…
Seriously. You can’t make a perfect project. You can’t just “will” a project to success. Too many variables. But you can do all that you can do to make a project engagement successful. And the two biggest ingredients to that…
Most project managers will tell you that the projects they enjoy the most are the ones they get to see through from beginning to end. In the world of project management, however, it is often a rare thing…depending on your…
What do you do when a customer complains about something on the project? Are you abrasive? Defensive? Apologetic? No matter what happens, no matter whose fault it is, we should always be apologetic. Not that the customer is always right,…
In Part 1 of this two part series we started looking at the first two areas of my list of five that a project manager who is working with an offshore development team needs to focus on. We covered identifying…
Profitability on our projects is always a goal – especially as our senior management looks at our portfolio of projects. And there is probably no greater factor into that profitability than our own human resources that are charging to our…
Good communication doesn’t always = good decision-making. Think of it almost as a different take on “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” only from a different angle. And a more dangerous angle. Why? Because the squeaky wheel one is the…
In Part 1 of this two-part series, we looked at what I considered to be things that we absolutely need on every project, no matter what the size, dollars or length in duration the project may be. I look forward…
A project is a project, right? Well, sort of. But it does stand to reason that not every engagement needs to be managed to the same level of detail. Certainly a $5,000 two-week project doesn’t require the same up front…
Many times we find ourselves running the project methodically because we’re busy, we have lots of projects on our plate and things are going fairly well. Kind of like the saying, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” But when…
Delivering bad news. It’s never easy and never fun – unless you happen to be one of those individuals who enjoys the shock value in such communication. I don’t. And I’m guessing most of my readers feel that way too…