I’m going back to work. It’s my first day in the office and on leaving the house I bump into a neighbour. In the terribly British way we have, we talk about the weather. “Isn’t this sun great?” he says. “It’s like being on holiday. I wish it was like this all the time.” I…
This is a contributed article by Ian Needs, Marketing Manager at KeyedIn Solutions. It’s been about a year since the London Olympics. Imagine you were the manager of transportation programmes during the Games. That’s a huge responsibility. Where would you start? How would you stay organised? For most of us, Olympic project management is a…
I take it back. We aren’t getting more sleep. In fact, I’m too tired to come up with any parenting/project management cross-over lessons this month. Here is a picture of Jack’s feet instead.
As regular readers will know, I’ve been on maternity leave since January, and I’m now easing myself back into work. I spoke to Janice Haddon, a coach and management consultant who specialises in helping people return to work successfully (amongst other things). This is what she had to say about returning to work after a…
15 weeks in and we are starting to get a bit more sleep in the Otobos household. And as with anything new, we’re also getting better at it. At least, I think we are – we’ve managed an overnight trip to the seaside staying in a hotel and a couple of long weekends away staying…
I did not expect to be the kind of parent that dressed my child in comedy outfits – in fact, before Jack was born I was adamant that I wouldn’t do that. Parents are embarrassing enough when you are 18 without having them bring out all the embarrassing photos of you as a child. But…
Recently I spoke to risk expert Dr Wilhlem Kross about risk communication and the challenges facing project managers talking about risk. Here is the second part of that interview, in which Wilhelm and I talk about how project managers can best communicate about risk on their projects. Wilhelm, you talked about how sometimes people communicating…
It can be hard to talk to stakeholders about risk, but project status reports should include information about the risks faced by the project. In 2013, risk expert Dr Wilhlem Kross, a partner of Plejades and the Amontis Consulting network, spoke at Project Zone Congress in Frankfurt about real-life risk management. I caught up with…
This is a guest post by Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration. Project managers have had to deal with ‘matrix management’ for decades. They have to build the skills to manage short and long-term teams with representatives from different functions, regions and specialisations. The matrix actually first developed as a response to the need to…
The video of me at Øredev speaking about how customer centricity improves success is available online on the conference website. It’s a presentation about the case study in the book I co-wrote with Phil Peplow last year, Customer Centric Project Management, but it also includes an updated project case study and some material that didn’t…
Eight weeks or so in, and The Parent Project is causing a lot of debate in our house. Thanks for all your lovely comments and emails about Jack, and your advice about how I can use my project management skills in parenting, as many of you do already. Here are some of the other things…
Change is hard, and project managers aren’t particularly good at doing it to themselves – in my experience we prefer to implement change for others. Kevin Baker, Head of Project & Programme Management Operations at Airbus, took on the challenge of changing the way they manage projects. I spoke to him about how he implemented…