PMcrunch

When considering training…or just simply places to place your own efforts… Are you better off working on your strengths or your weaknesses? The answer may surprise you!

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Managing becomes so much easier when you build a foundation for what you are managing. In essence, this means getting intimate with the requirements, as well as the needs of the stakeholders. Stakeholder management and familiarity with requirements rank about as high as it gets as determinants of project success. The reason is simple: they form the basis upon which everything else is built. Building a strong foundation in these areas makes it easy to take any next steps toward managing the project.

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If you are at all like me, achieving work/life balance is a challenge. As I think about it, there are a few key things that present the greatest obstacles – and thus provide the starting point for managing the situation.

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I’m not happy. The printer has still not been fixed and now my chair is broken. The problem with the company is that it is going to the dogs. My boss is okay but has no clue what is going on.

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Project cutbacks are a common theme. In many cases, teams are simply reduced in size. In addition, project scopes are decreased while agile methods are a key way organizations develop software more efficiently. The term agility goes far beyond that.

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Many project managers are in somewhat functional roles where they are not neccessarily in a typical leadership positions. By contrast, other project managers are in significant leaderhsip roles where they have been given direct responsibility of the outcome of significant projects.

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Few weeks ago, I wrote a post about leadership in a virtual world in which I stated the limitations to achieve top leadership when not being directly engaged on site. The idea was that if a manager is not on site with regular phase time with subordinates, customers, associates, colleagues, and other stakeholders, he or she is not at all being positioned for increased leadership responsibility.

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Whatever performance review system is in place, the important thing for project management is that the line organization that holds ultimate responsibility for the project should be the primary input and judge of a project manager’s performance. Performance evaluation is often difficult in matrix-type organizations, such as those that include a PMO. Let’s take a look at some of the challenges.

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Project teams, project oriented organizations, and project management offices have an unusually strong opportunity today for building highly motivated project teams. The reason for that is projects sit at the center of a new evolving organizational structure.

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As Project Managers, it is our charge to maintain high ethical standards. Strong ethical standards are a key ingredient of great leadership. The responsibility of ethics leads me to think about 2 immediate dilemmas or challenges:

Do we ask ourselves whether or not we are doing the right thing?
Do our team members and stakeholders ask themselves that same eithical question?
These 2 questions cover the basics of ethics, but there is a broader organization challenge we must consider to ensure these ethical questions are being handled.

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