From the category archives:

Teams

Is your project team a sales force in disguise?

May 14, 2012

This is a guest post by Jon Swain, President of Ten Six Consulting. Strong project sponsorship is critical to ensuring that your project is a success. One of the roles of a sponsor is to champion the project and the project team. This includes making sure the project gets the recognition and resources it requires. [...]

Read more

Talking Project Politics: Interview with Nita Martin

February 27, 2012

Politics. Every project has politics. Today I’m interviewing Dr Nita Martin, Managing Director of Pure Indigo. Nita’s book, Project Politics: A Systematic Approach to Managing Complex Relationships, deals with that difficult subject of how things get done on projects. Nita, ‘politics’ means different things to different people. How do you define project politics? ‘Project politics’ [...]

Read more

How to be a PMO Leader: Book Review of Leading Successful PMOs

December 14, 2011

Project managers have to be project leaders as well, at least some of the time. But what happens when you want to take the next step and lead a PMO? Peter Taylor’s new book, Leading Successful PMOs, explains. He discusses the PMO that he led at Siemens. It was a three year journey. They began [...]

Read more

Turning the Generation Gap upside down: 5 tips for working with Baby Boomers

December 7, 2011

PM Network last month reported that 65% of people feel that there is a generation gap in project management. We are living in the first period where five generations are working together in the workplace. Experienced (i.e. older) project managers now have Generation X and Generation Y people on their teams. The age differences at [...]

Read more

Why you should assume positive intent

October 19, 2011

Students coming to study in London for the new university term will quickly realise that in the capital you generally do not assume positive intent. In fact, Not Assuming Positive Intent is the default. You assume that other commuters will fight you for the last tube seat. You assume that your pockets will get picked [...]

Read more

Book review: Managing Projects: A team-based approach

August 29, 2011

I have read a lot of project management books over the last 5 years, and I’m pleased to say that this is my 65th book review. Read all the project management book reviews here. Managing Projects: A Team-Based Approach is a text book by Karen B. Brown and Nancy Lea Hyer. I can’t think of [...]

Read more

How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 2: Dealing with the Challenges

July 4, 2011

In my last post about project management in a matrix structure I shared 4 challenges of that environment. This week I want to talk about how we can overcome these. This was a topic that Shilpa Arora, PMP, spoke about at a recent Women in Technology event. The 4 challenges she discussed were: Lack of [...]

Read more

How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 1: Understanding the Matrix

June 27, 2011

Most projects operate in some kind of matrixed environment. Project managers rarely have direct line management responsibility for all, if any, of the people on the project team. So how can we best get things done when we don’t control the team? In this article, I’ll explain what matrix management is and why it creates [...]

Read more

Villanova Friday: Week 1: Understanding Your Leadership Style

February 4, 2011
This entry is part 1 of 9 in the series Villanova Friday

I’m taking a course with Villanova University called Maximising IS/IT Team Effectiveness.  This is Week 1, and already I’m overwhelmed. The first time I log in, there are already messages on the message board, documents to download and entries on the class roster.  I can’t make the video lectures work despite reading the help files [...]

Read more