Overcoming Adversity: How My Friend Became a Project Manager

Posted by on May 22, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers | Comments Off

Overcoming Adversity: How My Friend Became a Project Manager

Here at Arras People we often get asked about how can someone make the move into project management. In this post, Pam Warren shares one story that highlights the fact that there isn’t only one answer. “I’ve got a friend (we’ll call him Guy) who for me typifies a head-strong management consultant. Until recently, he was a project manager at a charity NGO, and his ability to plan and initiate complex projects is now helping him make headways in consultancy work. However, it wasn’t always like this, and his in-road into the world of management was quite a strange one. First: a little context.

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It’s not worth my while doing this…

Posted by on May 21, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers | Comments Off

It’s not worth my while doing this…

Some of my garden tools needed sharpening and I tried to find someone locally to do the job. I could not find anyone. I went on line which proved fruitless, until I thought I hit the jackpot.   I sent an email off to the company and they came back pretty quickly and said: “I am only able to travel … Read More >

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The project manager is leaving. What will we do?

Posted by on May 14, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers | Comments Off

The project manager is leaving. What will we do?

It has been the big news of the week here in the UK, that football’s longest serving manager Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United, is to retire at the end of the season on 19th May 2013. He has been in the role for 26½ years and has an unrivalled record of premiership wins, and trophies won over the time … Read More >

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PM-Foundations – Understanding the Maturity of Your Project Office

Posted by on May 12, 2013 in PMChat Bloggers | Comments Off

PM-Foundations – Understanding the Maturity of Your Project Office

Let me start by saying that this blog post does not dive into the depths of project or capability maturity models. I am focused in this discussion on how to build a project based organization that delivers in a consistent and effective manner across the project portfolio. I run across many clients that hire, contract, and develop a team of strong project managers, and still describe situations where they are achieving mixed results in terms of the success of their projects. Although people are certainly an important element of building a solid project office, it is not the only component required to provide tangible value to the overall organization. Establishing a mature project organization represents the process of assembling the right team, supporting the team with solid processes and tools, and most importantly creating a project based culture and competency that consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations. Why is Maturity Important? Maturity within the project organization represents an enabler to improve project delivery results

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How people deal with change

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

How people deal with change

I went along to one of Maven Training ‘s free seminars a few weeks ago – they’re bite size overviews of some of the courses they have on offer and this one was Change Management. That’s change management in relation to organisational change or business transformation – not change as in change control. I love this subject – partly because my degree was in psychology and partly because this was a huge subject area for HP where I used to work years ago. I’m convinced that the change management training course is just a psychology course really because of the huge amount of focus on the people impacted by the change. It was great to have an hour or so top-up on the subject and one of the things that stuck with me after the session was the different types of people – their ways of learning and how they take on new information. So if there is a change in their work due to a larger transformation taking place in the business they’ll either approach it as  Theorists; Activists; Reflectors or Pragmatists .   It’s the Kolb learning styles or experiential learning theory.

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