PMcrunch

As summer nears, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, thoughts of more time off and vacation occur for most of us. As project and program leaders, it is good, for a moment, to reflect and review our perspective on time off, especially in the current business environment.

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Project management in one sense can be a pretty dry field. While it can be exciting professionally and emotionally, it also can be relatively mechanical in many ways and to many people. However, as I think about it, most things are actually that way. Most things can get to be ho-hum and humdrum. The difference I find is when we decide to do things with style. We add some class to our actions and become a different kind of project manager. Let me give you my thoughts.

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There has been a tremendous amount of buzz more recently about PMOs, otherwise known as Project Management Offices. Here is what a select group of experts are saying about PMOs today.

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As Project Managers, we are called upon to be leaders much of the time – and really should be thinking about it all of the time. Rather than suggesting that we merely “think outside of the box”, I am suggesting that we “think outside the project”, because, that might be a little more appropriate for the world we as project managers are traveling in. The keys to better leadership performance – and this is a very individual thing – probably lies in our thinking outside of our project.

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The Student Syndrome is something that we all have experienced one way or another. It is evident that most of us tend to do at least to some degree of cramming for exams, completing papers, completing projects, doing problem sets and more. The student syndrome is based on our human tendency. For example, the student syndrome is demonstrated where, if we have 25 days to do an assignment, we put off most of the work until the final days or hours before it is due!

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Parkinson’s Law – the concept that work expands to meet the time available – is a common human behavioral reality. To deal with it, we can always tighten up the timeframe or define the work and deliverables more explicitly, but it is not always so straightforward to deal with.

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I was recently at an off site meeting for an office of about 25 people. There were many interesting things about the experience, and I would like to document a few. The upshot is that the people around you are tremendous resources, and you can tap that, it is like mining gold!

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Personality is an important consideration in team building. Think about how people have different individual work styles and how they work differently in a group differs! Understanding how you and your team members tend to work can help each of us to work together more effectively. One popular way to discover personalities and its effect work styles is the use of the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

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Many of us are working on – or have already completed – [tag-tec]New Year’s resolutions, goals, plans[/tag-tec/, and the like. What I think is the most important aspect of this is that it allows us to focus on the important.

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Delegation is something that we must do excellently in order to be managers, and we must do very skillfully to be leaders. At first glance, it would seem to be easy to delegate work to subordinates, but actually doing it well is often much more complex.

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