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My team was asked this week if a staff person could be added to our project management software so he could initiate contracts.

We do use our project management software to initiate some contracts, and adding this person to the software so he can use the existing contract request form would be one ...

I don’t know that I thought too much about decision-making growing up, because it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that some decisions started to feel genuinely hard. Maybe that’s because as a kid, I found myself within a structure that generations of adults before me had created to guide me toward ...

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...

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 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...

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 ...

Sometimes you run across a little nugget on the internet—a graphic, a video, a quote, whatever—that you find yourself continuing to reference, show people, or send people again and again. I have a few nuggets like these marked as favorites in the photos app on my phone. They illustrate points I find...

As a project manager, I suspect you’re in a fair number of meetings.

I hope those meetings are productive, and if they’re not, I’d love to help you change that!

But regardless, meetings are a communication tool—a means to an end for your project—which means you’ll need to come out of the meeting w...

The more I write about project management, the more I find myself talking about the “tools I have in my toolbox.” When I use this metaphor, I’m essentially talking about the possible responses I know about and feel prepared to use to various scenarios that arise in the course of managing projects. A...

I once had a coworker who had clearly mastered the art of managing his own workload. He had a really positive way of saying no to new requests that were beyond his capacity. His response would almost magically leave you feeling good, even though he’d just declined to do what you asked.

At the time,...