In previous articles I have emphasized that ultimate success is not determined by weather the project was completed on time, within budget, or according to specifications, but whether the customer is satisfied with what has been accomplished. Customer satisfaction is the bottom line. Bad news travels faster and further than good news. For every happy…
Negotiating – Uncovering It’s Secrets
Effective negotiating is critical to successful collaboration. All it takes is one key problem to explode to convert a sense of “we” into “us versus them.” At the same time, negotiating is pervasive through all aspects of project management work. Successful Negotiating – Requirements Project managers must negotiate support and funding from top management. They…
Negotiation – 4 Key Points To Increase Your Effectiveness
The introduction to the art of negotiation can be found here. I encourage you to read that first to get the an introduction to the topic and then come back to this article. I have provided links between the two for easy navigation. Negotiation Framework Fisher and Ury from the Harvard Negotiation Project champion an…
Did it happen to you? Are You The Project Management Expert?
Work and no pleasure is not the way to go.(Obviously!) So we have decided to go out there and find some funny project management clips and put some smiles on those faces. We start off with one of the most viewed ones on the internet: The project management expert. We would like to thank the…
Dealing With Unreasonable People the BATNA Framework
Most people working on projects realize that in the long run it is beneficial to work toward mutually satisfying solutions. Still, occasionally you encounter someone who has a dominant win/lose attitude about life and will be difficult to deal with. Fisher and Ury recommend that you use negotiation jujitsu when dealing with unreasonable people, such…
Outsourcing Project Work – 7 Best Practices
This is the second part of a short guide on outsourcing. If you have landed on this article via a Google/Bing search then I encourage you to take a look at this article first and then follow the links to read the entire guide. This article describes some of the best practices I have observed…
Outsourcing Project Work: Why, How, When?
…being a good partner has become a key corporate asset. I call it a company’s collaborative advantage. In the global economy, a well developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive leg up.—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor It is rare in today’s flat world to find important projects…
Outsourcing Project Work – 4 Advantages and Disadvantages
This is the first part of a short guide on outsourcing. If you have landed on this article via a Google/Bing search then I encourage you to take a look at this article first and then come back to this one. Outsourcing Overview The term outsourcing has traditionally been applied to the transferring of business…
7 Easy Ways You Can Rejuvenate Your Project Team
Over the course of a long project, a team sometimes drifts off course and loses momentum. The project manager needs to swing into action to realign the project team with the project objectives and step on the pedal. What options are there for the project team? There are both formal and informal solutions. Informal actions:…
Virtual Project Team: Challenges, Solutions, Success
Building a high-performance project team among a mixture of part-time and full-time members is a challenging task. Consider how much more challenging it is to build a team when members cannot engage in face-to-face interactions. Such would be the case for a virtual project team in which the team members are geographically situated so that…