So You Want to be a PM: How to Manage Up
Hundreds of business books dole out advice on how to be a better manager, but the majority focus on how to manage from the top down. One topic that does not receive sufficient attention but is arguably just as important is how to manage not down--but up.
10 Tips for 10 Years
This past weekend, I celebrated my 10-year anniversary of being a project manager. Here are the 10 tips I'd recommend for my 10 years in the project management profession.
How to Get Lucky in Project Management
This St. Patrick's Day, I'm reflecting on the many sources of luck in my life. On this day when we celebrate luck, what should aspiring and seasoned project managers do to get lucky in project management?
(Daylight) Saving Time
On this daylight saving time, I challenge project managers to inventory their outdated practices and habits and ditch the ones that don't realize benefits--especially considering we have one less hour in which to get things done this week. Here are some preliminary suggestions for which project management activities to examine that you may have on auto pilot:
Product Review: Simplenote
As a PM nerd, I'm always on the hunt for project management hacks that will make my projects (and my life) more efficient. Today's featured tool is Simplenote. It's a desktop, web, and mobile application developed by Automattic, the parent company behind the Wordpress blogging platform. The application's purpose is truly as basic as it sounds--to offer a clean and simple interface for taking notes.
Sorry, but I Still Don't Get What You Do
The idea for this post came from two different sources. One of those sources is a good friend from when I was still a project manager in the making. (Early warning signs: my friends referred to me as "the glue" keeping our high school crew together. And, I wouldn't let anyone touch my day planner.) The other is the person who hired me for my first, official PM gig.
So You Want to Be a PM: The Importance of Follow-up
It's 3pm on a Wednesday, and you just pushed send on the report draft you've been slaving over for the past two weeks. Per your boss's request, you've sent the draft to the client two weeks ahead of schedule to solicit input in advance of the report deadline. With that task completed, you decide to take the rest of the week off. When you show up to work on Monday, your boss asks you where the client comments are. What went wrong?
Automation: The Future of Project Management
In an age of driverless cars, UAVs, and smart cities, robots appear to be on the rise. Project managers already suffer from a perception that we are unnecessary, costly appendages—substituting us with a mechanical appendage, therefore, may pose a very real threat.
What If?
Leaving the methodologies of waterfall or agile or hybrid aside, what are the core elements of project management that every PM needs to know? I've been pondering that question for a few weeks now, when building block #1 came to me. And that is the simple question: "what if?" That question should guide everything that project managers do.
Stealthy Performance Measurement
Like most project management jargon, the term "performance measurement" makes the activity involved sound way more complicated than it actually is. Upon hearing this phrase, most clients will picture a series of lengthy working sessions that generate a set of metrics ultimately destined for a life of obscurity on someone's hard drive. How can we simplify performance measurement for our project management averse clients?
Project Management Anti-Resolutions
As part of my typical New Year's retrospective, I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea of anti-resolutions...or the things that we PMs should stop doing. Read on for a list of my project management anti-resolutions for 2018.
3 Things PMs Should Stop Saying (and 2 Things They Shouldn't)
Today, I want to share the power of language that PMs use when they interact with their teams (and, secondarily, their clients.) Here are 3 things that PMs (but really anyone in the working world) should stop saying: