Trust your team

It’s the people we work with who get projects done, but sometimes we don’t act like it. When people talk about project management, a lot of the time they only seem to focus on the easy bits – the processes, procedures and methodologies. I don’t mean that these are simple to do, but they can … Read more

Building Interfaces

Working in IT project management, I’ve had a lot of experience in building interfaces as part of my projects. But the important ones are nothing to do with the technology. When you are working on an IT project, it can be too easy to get carried away with the technical possibilities. I have worked with … Read more

Are you an expert?

Elizabeth Harrin has an interesting post up at A Girl’s Guide to Project Management called Use your experts. Despite my general lack of understanding of the importance of a good haircut (as anyone who has seen me recently can confirm…) I was interested by the idea of a project manager as someone who knows the … Read more

Be the Bad Guy

I read an interesting blog post the other day, called How Consensus Decision-Making Creates Shared Direction in a Team. The gist of the article is that for a team to be highly energised and committed to their work, they need to share a sense of direction. Now, I have to say that I broadly agree … Read more

Wasteful Savings

Times are tough for everyone out there at the moment. The economies of Europe and the US are slowing down again, and there are real fears that they could dip back down into recession. So it’s only natural that businesses are looking to cut their costs – but sometimes they are making the wasteful saving … Read more

Identify the problem

We all want to have successful projects. But what do we mean by successful? It’s not just a matter of hitting our milestones, on time and on budget. It’s also about making sure that the project goals are of value to the organisation we are working for. At the start of every project, you will … Read more

Making a difference

Project management is about creating change. All projects invole some sort of change, a change that will be beneficial to the organisation running the project. That’s why we have to be comfortable with change. Embracing change is one of the ways that project management is different from other sorts of management. In a business as … Read more

Professionalism and Society

Recently, I wrote about a preliminary study that had been done attempting to compare the value of various project management qualifications. I pointed out that, at least in part, it seemed to comparing apples with oranges, in that one qualification considered (PRINCE2) doesn’t try to sell itself as a general project management qualification, but specifically … Read more

Just talk

How do you find out the requirements for a product in your project? How do you find out how long a certain task will take? How do you make sure your Executive is up to date with where the project is? Communication is a vital part of project management. To me, it is the most … Read more

Fear of Failure

Last time, I talked about my hardest project, the production of Understanding Project Management. The work was hard, but so far feedback on the sneak preview has been good. The whole process has also given me a new insight into the difficulties faced by our team members. If they are too personally invested into what … Read more