PMcrunch

“Performance metrics” is an especially popular topic in management today. The idea is to try to measure everything by some sort of metric that gives a true picture of our degree of success or effectiveness. But like many management techniques, it is subject to misuse. Here are my suggestions for identifying relevant metrics and using them effectively.

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“Performance metrics” is an especially popular topic in management today. The idea is to try to measure everything by some sort of metric that gives a true picture of our degree of success or effectiveness. But like many management techniques, it is subject to misuse. Here are my suggestions for identifying relevant metrics and using them effectively.

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We never really arrive at the end of the road in our quest to become leaders. We may achieve [tag-tec]leadership[/tag-tec] status in some way but it is always a moving target. Indeed, I believe it is our own movement on a continuous basis that can enable us to maintain ourselves as a leader. One way that we can do this is by continuously evaluating our own leadership capabilities.

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I recently read a foreign post where somebody asked if project management was good preparation for the job of CEO. There were a variety of comments most of which I find somewhat discouraging saying that, [tag-tec]project management[/tag-tec] was inadequate preparation for a CEO position and that CEO positions involve a lot of different skills. While arguably these things are true, I think that we can take a positive take on that question and ask “What would differentiate a project manager who might on the CEO track from one who is not?”

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In thinking about shareholder management or investor management, especially in today’s volatile environment, I see a big parallel with stakeholder management.  In essence stakeholders are the investors in our projects.  Stakeholders hold a “stake” in our projects.  Stakeholders, just like investors, have different levels of investment or interest in our projects.  We must think of [...]

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As a program or project manager, one must keep an eye on both the near term and long term.  Today, under tough economic conditions, we typically turn to more near-term thinking because the focus needs to be first on survival before considering future plans.  We need to be careful however to not take this near-term thinking too [...]

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The benefits of conducting an annual employee survey is widely accepted but many organizations have been put off by the amount of effort those annual surveys take to deploy.

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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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As project managers, we often are handed projects once they are sold. For example, in a consulting organization, a sales force will often sell a project which then is assigned to a project manager. Similarly, within organizations, someone has “sold” a project to upper management and to stakeholders and then the project is assigned to a project manager for implementation.

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An important consideration for any business is to think about whether or not its business model is effective. Presumably, any business will have at least a somewhat effective business model because if they did not, they will not be able to stay in business for long. How does the concept of business model impact project management?

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