I recently watched a video on a study centered on improving productivity in the workplace. The top cited problems for work interruptions and lack of concentrated efforts toward producing results while at work were, Managers and Meetings. Upon reflecting on what I now call the M&M factor, I realized it is indeed quite accurate. When I think of going to a place to get some serious work done, I unfortunately do not think of the office and I’m not alone. Managers are one thing, and they have a j...
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Team Dynamics
Connecting for Success
Everywhere we go we are bombarded with messages and someone vying for our attention. Every advertisement, politician, family member, or friend, has a message and something to say to us and many ways in which to say it; email, text message, Facebook posts, tweets, magazine articles, on and on. Our world is cluttered with words. So, how do you as a leader or more importantly your team choose, which to tune in and which to tune out?
As a project manager, you’re constantly tasked with getting you...
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Corporate Culture – Part 3
In parts one and two of this series, we've looked how corporate cultures affect the outcomes a project attains and where cultures come from. In this final post in the series we'll look at the mechanisms through which cultures spread and what organizations can do to promote a healthy culture.
Pretty much every business leader understands the value of having a positive corporate culture. The state of many businesses however illustrates that not every business leader understands how to shape...
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Corporate Culture – Part 2
Last week I posted thread that outlined some of the different types of corporate culture and started the process of looking into how corporate culture influences project outcomes. In this week's post we'll look at where cultures come from.
Part of the reason corporate culture is so poorly understood is because few organizations appreciate how cultures form. Cultures are invisible and they are hard to define. They develop out of ongoing interactions rather than a single moment in time and ...
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Corporate Culture – Part 1
Culture is a powerful force in any human system. It establishes the norms of behavior and acts as a reference point for the expectations we have of each other and ourselves. While we are all used to the idea of culture in our public societies (cultures driven by national identity, religious affiliation, generational groups and /or fashion), culture in the workplace gets less attention. While the phase "corporate culture" is banded around, few organizations really have a grasp of what it is, how ...
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Attitudes for Altitude
Lesson learned: Hire for attitude and potential, not just experience.
Category: Person skills development / hiring.
The following post is a "Lesson Learned" that comes from the analysis of the failed projects documented in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” or from the experiences the editorial team have had working with clients around the world. The post is published here to spark discussion and help individuals and organizations think about what it takes to improve project success rates.
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And now – A Message TO our Sponsors
The Sponsorship role is perhaps the most important in a project. The Sponsor owns the project and has a direct responsibility for ensuring that the desired business outcomes are achieved. In discussing project failures with people, one of the common complaints I hear is that the Sponsorship role is either non-existent or weak in their organizations. Ownership of projects is often unclear and no one really champions the project within the organization. Project Managers are left holding the baby a...
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Project Management Heresy
I’ve just finished reading a book about the Apollo missions that put man on the moon (Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox). The Apollo project was initiated by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he announced to the US Congress his believe that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth". In July 1969 that goal was achieved when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed...
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The Incentives Infrastructure
One of the pillars of successful Project Management is the need for a project to have a clearly defined goal. Establishing a goal provides a basis for the project’s scope to be established, provides a way to measure success and provides a reference point for use when making project related decisions.
There’s no doubt that establishing clear, measurable objectives is an important step in setting a project on the road to success, but a clear goal is sometimes insufficient to ensure that everyon...
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Fear of Commitment
One of the fundamentals taught in Project Management class is the need to define what the success of the project will look like. Only by establishing a picture of the desired end state are we able to establish project scope properly and make effective decisions about how to manage the project. In Project Management class we’re taught to express project success as specific measures that define the project’s goals. These measures are often captured using SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Ach...
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