Projects Take a Community….to Succeed and to Fail

Posted by on May 23, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers | 0 comments

By Eileen Strider In the world of projects, organizations reward project managers for success and punish them for failure, as if the project manager was solely responsible for either. As a project manager, you know this perspective is both a trap and a myth. Projects don’t succeed or fail based only on the actions of the project manager. A project manager’s skills are certainly important. Having project management expertise, training, communication skills, a good head on your shoulders and a healthy dose of courage are valuable assets. And if you have these, then you know the entire project community can either support or sink a project. The people who directly work on the project are viewed as “The Project Team” with the project manager as their leader.

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Guest Blogger, and PM Expert, Matt Ferguson discusses how to manage the Millennial PM

Posted by on May 20, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Guest Blogger, and PM Expert, Matt Ferguson discusses how to manage the Millennial PM

It is nearly impossible these days to read any industry rag from the Human Resources or management fields and not come across the topic of “ the millennials ” . For the uninitiated, the millennial employee (or Generation Y depending on your bias) was born between 1981 and 1999 thus making them between 32 and 14 years old as of this blog.   Studies have shown that the millennials are characterized by traits of entitlement and narcissism (based on personality surveys), a focus on becoming wealthy (75% of respondents in a University of Michigan study said this was the main goal of employment), a confidence in their abilities that border on hubris, and a need for social interaction and team participation that is hard for most managers to understand.   They idolize the dot-com entrepreneurs who wore flip flops to work and took the reins of an organization before they hit 30. Conversely, they don’t understand the career trajectory of the industrial CEO who started as a junior engineer and ascended over a 30 year career with the same firm. They learned to network and develop relationships in cyberspace and came to believe that the only measure for the quality of your ideas was how many “likes”, “retweets”, or “trackbacks” you got from the digital masses. They look quizzically at relationships that take time, and substance, to nurture

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Investment in project leadership skills declines…from an already low point

Posted by on May 13, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Investment in project leadership skills declines…from an already low point

A couple of weeks ago I raised the following question: Is the lack of project leadership training the reason we are still struggling with projects? Many responded with some very interesting insights. In this post I present data clearly showing that, despite organizations’ complaining about the apparent lack of leadership skills, that investments in soft skills training, and training generally, is on a disturbing decline. First, a little background. For the past three years, ESI has conducted its annual Global State of the PMO Survey. In year two, we asked the respondents (> 3,000 responded) to tell us where their organization was investing in their development. We categorized respondents into two camps: those that work directly for the PMO, and those who are influenced by the PMO but do not report directly into it

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Organizations cry out for better project leaders yet invest more in hard skills

Posted by on Apr 29, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Organizations cry out for better project leaders yet invest more in hard skills

Psychologists and learning professionals have an interesting term they use for when things are, in my view, “out of whack.” They call it cognitive dissonance. Here’s an example. You’re in a conversation with your “better half” and say something that angers him or her. You recognize their anger and say ”don’t be mad.” They look you square in the eye and yell “I’M NOT MAD”!   Of course they are but they don’t really see it that way. That’s cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance at work Organizations are like that when it comes to training project managers.

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Being Understood

Posted by on Apr 24, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers | Comments Off

Being Understood

by Wayne Strider “Pay attention to what I mean, not what I say.” my father would sometimes say to me when I was a kid.  I did not know what to make of that. To me it appeared that sometimes he said what he meant, sometimes he did not. My problem was I could not tell which was which.  On a good day I could get it right about half the time.  On a bad day I could not get it right at all.  As a youngster I was confused and frustrated by my apparent inability to understand what my father wanted.  I was equally frustrated that I could not seem to make myself understood. Though we never talked about it, my father probably did not feel understood by me. I certainly did not feel understood by him. As a result we were not very good together.  By that I mean he and I could not effectively do the work of creating the family we wanted to be, and though we enjoyed many happy moments together, we missed out on a lot of potentially satisfying experiences with one another other.

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