PMcrunch

Here’s a quick Pareto Principle List. I have been thinking about this a good bit lately…and trying to see my day to day expenditure of time and energy through this lens.

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Most good managers in project and program management know the importance of maintaining relationships with team members and stakeholders. Basic human relations can go a long way in improving overall program and project quality. However, I have learned that there is a community beyond our immediate team members and stakeholders that are worth considering in everything we do.

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Networking has always been an important activity for everyone – especially professionals on the move. The fact is, no matter where you want to go, you can probably get there faster, and more efficiently, if you have a good network. Networking can also be a great deal of fun.

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Most of us are familiar with the old story of the tortoise and the hare. They raced each other one day and the hare raced off to a rapid start, took a nap, and continued the race in a cycle of rapid sprints and long naps. By contrast, the tortoise plodded along slowly but steadily to the end of the race, albeit at a very slow pace throughout. In the end, the tortoise actually won. While slow and steady may win the race, the best teams make the most out of both the tortoise and the hare. Here are my thoughts.

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If you were like me, you have been on some projects over time where somehow it was not even apparent who the manager of the project was. Sometimes, there is no project manager. At other times, there is a technical lead. At other times, there is someone who calls themselves the project manager but they are not really a project manager at all. How can these situations be handled professionally?

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Most of us know that we personally are limited by how we see ourselves. If we see ourselves as a winner, the likelihood of us being a winner, in any given endeavor, goes up dramatically. If we see ourselves as a loser, our chances of success are really low. Of course, these are examples at the extremities. There are many many shades of grey in between.

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As project managers we… well, manage projects! Or, do we? Actually, as I have been thinking about my experience managing projects and my experience managing my own time, I really think all we do manage are tasks. It is actually the practice of project management that simply allows us to manage more complex collections of tasks. Likewise, managing programs enables us to manage all that much more complex tasks, managing a company goes even further, and so on and so forth. This is a revelation to me that I actually find refreshing and empowering.

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For many years now, the debate over global warming and environmental consciousness has raged. This debate has become deeply embedded into the political consciousness, especially in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world. One thing is for sure: this debate will continue for a long time to come, and it will be a long time before any claims are proven indisputably accurate. So, the question is, how can we incorporate environmental correctness into our projects and programs?

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Basic project management teaches us that quality is defined by meeting requirements, but not exceeding them. If we deliver more than what the customer asked for, it is considered to be gold plating – a bad thing. The premise is that there is a balance as per the triple constraint among quality, cost and schedule, and that it is the job of the project manager to manage that balance. In these tough times, however, how can a project manager produce excellence and in essence exceed customer expectations without gold plating?

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On your project teams over time, there surely have been “pivotal performances”. Just like in a basketball game there was something that the winning team did throughout the game, that proved to be pivotal to the outcome of that game. There are things that each team member, and the team as a whole does throughout a project, that are pivotal to the projects success. The question is, how do you find those things, and how do you get your project team to turn in pivotal performances, routinely.

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