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At my company, in the first few years we had a project management department, it was optional for other teams to work with us when they wanted to get things done. As much as this reality wasn’t my favorite, it certainly gave me a lot of practice in persuasion and put me in the habit of thinking abou...

This week I’ve been working on a reset plan for a multi-year project. Its goal is to get multiple external websites, internal websites, and other miscellaneous data off an old web server and onto a new one. Because the project has been so long and included multiple pivots, entropy has set in and mad...

As project managers, we’re constantly in scenarios where we don’t have all the information we need. Sometimes this is just because we’re in the initial process of gathering it—in this case, keep asking questions and collecting requirements.

But what about when information isn’t forthcoming? What if...

When I hear discussions about AI’s near-term potential in project management, many of the discussed use cases fall into one of these two categories:

1. Writing Help: Project managers produce extensive written communication, not to mention written documents and other artifacts associated with project
...

I’m working on a project right now where the original plan looked like this:

• A staff member would use her laptop at home to record a screen-capture video in which she’d talk through training material while sharing slides.
• The footage would be passed to a video editor for very minor edits.
• The v
...

My company rolled out a re-org this week, and it included some surprising layoffs of people I’m very close to. Among those of us still at the company, the changes affect everyone, but they happen to affect me more than most.

My boss has been very kind, supportive, and flexible as I’ve worked throug...

At my company, I’m manager of the project management department. This means I’m the person at my company with the most knowledge of and experience in project management.

It’s a great honor and a privilege to lead a department and a function, and to be the one to provide direction to my whole compan...

Recently I heard a coworker use the phrase, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

I definitely resonated with this idea the first time I heard it, because I love planning and I love good boundaries. But over time I’ve come to realize its merit is mixed.

On ...

There’s a tough conversation I’ve been meaning to have with a coworker for several months, but I put it off.

I put it off partially because I wanted to ask her to change how her team does some things. My reasons are noble: I want her team to do things more consistently with standard project managem...

Some project managers are lucky enough to be handed a thorough project charter document when they’re first assigned to a project, complete with all the information they need to get the project started.

But for many of us, the process is more organic: when a sponsor brings us a project, only some of...