Greetings Leaders!

My daughter loves to dance and because of this I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Michael Flatley‘s Lord of the Dance. We actually went to see Riverdance a few years ago when it was in town, although Michael Flatley was retired by then. The dancing is spectacular. Precise. Inspiring. Rythmic. I began to wonder if we could learn anything from these spectacular shows when it comes to promoting project excellence.

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Greetings Leaders,

As a leader, I often hope to achieve consensus by working with individuals and groups to get them to a common ground. However, sometimes this just isn’t possible. I recently had several experiences where I had to push an issue until several people got upset with me. If you are practicing true leadership, sometimes you’re going to have to make people uncomfortable.

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Greetings Leaders!

Agile Project Management seems to be all  the buzz in project management circles these days. If you subscribe to any PM website, blog or newsletter you’re sure to run into articles promoting Agile PM or comparing it to a more traditional model, or lambasting it as nonsense. After reading a number of these… I just don’t get it. Or perhaps I do. Are we just repackaging good common sense, or looking for ways to make PM sexy?

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Greetings Leaders!

I’ve trained quite a few project managers over the years, but not many project sponsors. That’s a problem. Too many organizations ensure they have processes in place and trained project managers to use them, but ignore the project sponsor. While you may be tempted to think project sponsors don’t need training, informal polls among my students indicate that sponsors rarely understand their role, resulting in dysfunction. I continually emphasize that even the best project managers cannot succeed if the project environment is dysfunctional.

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Greetings Leaders!

I’m currently reading a book called The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy (Little Book, Big Profits) by James Montier. While the book centers around investing, the premises in the book are very applicable to leadership and life in general.

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Greetings Leaders!

There is a pretty interesting article at CIO Insight about Reinventing the PMO (read the article here). The general premise is that PMOs are good at delivering projects, but not so good at ensuring the project/product is actually what the business needs. Their recommendation – a Results Management Office (RMO). My response…. you’ve got to be kidding. This is insanity at best.

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Greetings Leaders!

Meetings… Meetings… Meetings. It seems like they take up quite a bit of your day doesn’t it? How do you feel about these meetings? Are they productive or a waste of time? If they are a waste of time, there are techniques you can use to change this.

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Greetings Leaders!

I was teaching a project management class last night and the topic of “Best Practices” came up. Some of the students wanted to know if I could use some of these during class. They were surprised when I told them no. I don’t believe in Best Practices.

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Greetings Leaders, Project Managers and Future Project Managers….

I had a colleague ask me for some advice the other day. He is a supervisor, acting as a project manager and he doesn’t like it. Most of the projects he manages are fairly small and he spends most of his time chasing paperwork and going to meetings. He was bored and frustrated and wanted to know if all project managers worked like this.

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Greetings Leaders!

I’m posting excerpts from The Curse of Project Management.