Blog

Project managers: have you had the experience of being brought into a project too late?

Maybe everyone else on the project team has already been informed about the project and begun work, and someone finally thought to contact you “so somebody can keep track of things.”

Or maybe you’ve overheard a...

As a project manager who supports over 100 active projects at a time, I have a decent volume of personal tasks or actions to manage in order to keep those projects on track.

This isn’t easy, and I’ve developed and combined many strategies in my 8 years in the field to keep my own workload manageabl...

Project managers deal in a lot of processes. We lead teams through them, and many of us also create and/or implement them. And while some organizations strive to have a unified process for all projects, the Project Management Institute increasingly emphasizes that much of a project manager’s value c...

As project managers, requests tend to fly at us all day. From project changes and status requests to process improvements and new projects to begin, tasks big and small come at us from all directions, and we must collect, organize, and work through them at a pace our companies find acceptable.

The ...

I’ve been a project manager for 8 years and I still don’t have project debrief meetings mastered.

Ideally in a debrief, postmortem, retrospective, or lessons learned meeting, the project team and other key stakeholders will reflect on what they’ve learned from the project so that similar projects c...

Inspired by two different real people I've talked with in the last few weeks who think a project management career might be on their horizon, I asked a fake person (the chatbot Claude.ai) to pretend to be in this situation and to interview me, an 8-year veteran in the field, about what the career is...

I am not being paid to read or promote the book discussed below.

I love being a project manager.

But one of the hardest things about my job is that my direct report and I, who make up the project management department, support over 300 active projects at a time between us.

We have a number of str...

How you initiate a project—or how it is initiated by others—matters.

Many things that happen or don’t happen at the beginning of a project can set that project up for problems later.

Don’t let this reality intimidate you or prevent you from getting a project started. Neither a new nor a seasoned p...

In high school I spent some time exploring engineering as a career field. I had a very logical brain and I enjoyed solving puzzles and problems with a fair amount of detail and technicality. I went to a few engineering camps at a local college to get a better understanding of what the role might be ...

Do you encounter naysayers who resist the idea of taking time to develop a plan before starting a project?

One challenge is that often resistance to planning isn’t direct. It tends to come in the form of people just trying to get project work started, either ignoring our requests as project manager...