As a manager, one of your most important responsibilities is making your staff feel truly valued and letting them know that your company/department (and you) would be worse off without them. You want to recognize the accomplishments of your top performers. In many cases, you do so by giving those staff more responsibilities or even a promotion. However, you must also know that not everyone wants more responsibility

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There’s nothing more annoying than a meeting that goes on and on. Whether you’re getting ready for a weekly team meeting or convening a larger group to discuss your company’s or department’s strategy, as a manager it’s your job to make sure people don’t go off on tangents or hog speaking time. But how can you keep people focused without squashing their creativity?

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As a hiring manager, you sometimes underestimate the value of a well-planned interview and interview process. It makes good sense to go the extra mile to ensure that the process is thorough so that the final result is rewarding for you and the organization. Not taking this process seriously can mean a poor employee selection, which will also cause your management to look poorly upon you and your decision.

Do Your Homework

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You have heard the comments from others, especially senior management. “Project management (PM) is simple blocking and tackling.” “All a PM has to do is work the plan.” Wow!! If it was that simple, the failure rate would not be over 80%, would it? What we PMs have to understand is that senior management sees PMs in the spectrum of their world. EVERYBODY reports to them. For a PM, the resources report to the project, not the PM. That is a major difference and one that has to be explained to senior management. However, I do believe that if a PM develops a plan that includes budget, scope, resource needs, and the risks, along with the schedule, then that should be part of the explanation. The major part of the explanation is communicating the plan to management and then working the plan.  

The major communication device to the project sponsor and senior management is the status report. Basically, all of the completed tasks, the risks and issues, as well as the upcoming tasks must be communicated in two pages. Whether the status report is called the RAG (Red, Amber, and Green) report or the RYG (Red, Yellow, and Green) report, a picture of the project is worth a thousand words. The PM must remember the audience for this report. Yes, we like the project schedule, the budget, and especially the risks and issues lists. But the sponsor and senior management want one or, at the most, two reports. I strongly suggest that the two most important reports during the execution and monitoring phases of the project are the status report and the risk and issues list. These two reports are what the sponsor and senior management understand. The status report is direct and short. The initial portion of the status report should have a short status of the project, for example “the report is on schedule.”  

On the risks and issues list, there should be mitigation to a risk if the risk becomes an issue. During the building of the schedule by the team, the PM should have led the team to identify the risks and the probability that the risks would happen and what the impact would be. Along with that calculation there should be the resolution to the risk if it becomes an issue. That solution must be identified and communicated to the team, especially to the project sponsor, and the sponsor must have buy-in to that solution. 

We have all heard that over 80% of projects “fail” to meet the project’s original goal.  What PMs fail to do is effectively communicate the risks and then the solutions. PMs also fail to communicate the change request effectively. Once a solution is communicated to the sponsor, senior management, and the team, the PM must guide them through how the solutions may change the project’s end date and possibly add to the budget. Once the PM communicates the change to the team, the PM must document it in a change request and present it to the change review board (CRB) and senior management.  Once this is done, the project is no longer a “failure” or going RED. The project is re-scoped and re-balanced to include this necessary change with a change in the end date and resources. 

I am open to discussion at any time on these blogs or anything else related to project management you would like to explore. If you would like to comment about this blog, please do so by posting on this blog or by responding in an email at Benny A. Recine. You may inspire a blog article. I look forward to your comments.

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Many people are troubled when they have to give a presentation in front of a large audience. It’s important to know that it’s normal to experience stage fright. Some presentations feel like magic and grab our attention. While enormous credit goes to the skill of the presenters, there are a few things we can all do to make our presentations great.

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Until about 1990, the conventional thinking was that if you did your job satisfactorily, you would keep it for many years to come. Several of my friends were AT&T employees in those days, and many of them had had seniority for one or two decades. So it seemed like they had it made and that […]

The post The Interview Focus Is on Future, Not Past appeared first on Landing Expert Career Coaching.

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During a discussion with a colleague, the topic of the project schedule vs. the project plan came up. The first thing I did was thank my colleague for correctly stating that the tool we Project Managers (PM) use–MS Project–is the schedule, NOT the plan. When I state this, I usually get a glazed look from folks who are not PMs or do not completely understand a PM’s role in the overall project plan. So a discussion is necessary to answer the question, “What is a project plan?”  The first thing we must do as PMs is stop using the term “project plan” when we really mean the project schedule. Now, we can begin the discussion of what is in the project plan.

Once these tools are established, the PM can then meet with Human Resources to begin building the schedule. This is another common fallacy that must be dispelled: the schedule is not built by the PM alone. On the contrary, the schedule is built by the team. You see, it is the team that puts together the tasks of the project, links the resources to the respective tasks, and then places a schedule for that task, creating the whole MS Project schedule. When this schedule is put together, then reality sets in regarding delivering the project on-time, within scope, and within budget. It is at this time that the first change request may be written and submitted.


I am open to discussion at any time on these blogs or anything else related to project management you would like to explore. If you would like to comment about this blog, please do so by posting on this blog or by responding in an email at Benny A. Recine. You may inspire a blog article. I look forward to your comments.

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