Category Archives: lessons learned

Many projects are sick before they even begin. The cause often is an improper, indistinct clarification of what has to be done. Particularly in many cases the translation from business requirements into technical specifications is a weak point. To understand the scope right you need to be clear about all

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Project managers’ communication shouldn’t be honest only, but also clear and unmistakably. How often did I experience uncomfortable messages or tasks brought to colleagues or superiors ponderously and with nice, ornate words. In the end everybody had understood something different, later discussions ended up in finger pointing but not in solutions.

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Going by the book each project should have one project lead superior to all other project functions. But I have seen many projects, especially in the technical area, where the project lead was mainly competently leading in professional matters but wasn’t sufficiently qualified as a project manager. Usually the consequence

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There are most probably lots of situations where you as a PM would like to make the progress or status or forecast look a little nicer, especially if you’re an employee and with regard to your boss and your career. This is how I sometimes feel, too, but I meanwhile

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I often see project managers in conflict in their job with the given frame conditions or expectations. For example that they are expected or even requested to achieve results or do things that in their opinion are not compatible with their convictions, judgements or sometimes just with good sanity and

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Just recently I experienced how things show their human side in a project: We were doing well, actually better than the plan and under budget, not at least because we strictly kept to the rule “no change without approved CR”. What should I tell you? All of a sudden, right

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We have learned it in our PM education: 80% of a project manager’s work is necessary communication. Unfortunately I find structures in many companies that are not supportive at all for this purpose: Silo thinking, hierarchy level autism, but also overwhelming correspondence, reporting and meetings. Especially in troubled projects (but

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For many people project management is mainly buerocratic overhead, for the majority of executives it is (still) a commodity. Actually the PM’s work should obviously provide an added value to the project, and be it only that nothing important gets forgotten. For this we “educated” project managers have a bunch

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