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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This morning I woke up to an ant in the bathroom. Then another. And another.

This isn’t the first year my husband and I have had ants—though why they typically first appear in our second-floor bathroom is fascinating to me. Ants are irritating when they make their way into...

If you’ve been a project manager for any length of time, have you noticed how much communicating you do?

I’ve heard it said that project managers have 3 priorities: communication, communication, and communication. I don’t disagree.

It begs the question, however: are we supposed...

Once I was supporting a project that lasted about 18 months. About a month away from the project deadline, I was feeling proud that I’d built trust with a new team on this project and led them through all the required decisions in a timely fashion. Most of the big project deliverables were...

I was perusing r/projectmanagement on Reddit and I found a post from a new IT PM who asked, “How do you gauge severity of testing issues that you don't fully understand?”

I didn’t weigh in on the conversation because I agree with a lot of the advice already provided: Lean on the...