General Project Management Postings

Turn right at the hot dog stand…

7 August 2011

I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a col­league recently where we were dis­cuss­ing dir­ec­tions from an air­port arrivals gate to the city shuttle bus, which, in a little detail was to turn right at the hot dog stand then left a few meters later, exit through the glass doors and look for the shuttle bus. […]

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Impostor Syndrome

23 October 2010

The concept of Impostor Syn­drome has been dis­cussed for a while in sev­eral dif­fer­ent con­texts, it is also some­thing some col­leagues and I have talked about from time to time recently and it is a phe­nomenon which can impact on the way many people in both col­loc­ated and vir­tual pro­ject teams are able to function […]

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Consistency of message in communicating to your team

14 August 2010

When you are try­ing to main­tain enthu­si­asm and coördin­a­tion in your team, whether they may be a small co-located group or a large vir­tual com­munity, it is crit­ic­ally import­ant to keep your mes­sage con­sist­ent at all levels of deliv­ery and in all meth­ods of deliv­ery. Whether the mes­sage is being form­al­ised in news­let­ters and announcements, […]

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The power of thank you as positive reinforcement in project teams

21 April 2010

Pos­it­ive rein­force­ment and recog­ni­tion through simple actions such as send­ing thank-you responses to emails is an incred­ibly effect­ive way to main­tain a team spirit and keep your staff feel­ing respected.

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Delegation of authority

22 January 2010

In the fore­thought sec­tion of the Decem­ber 2009 edi­tion of Har­vard Busi­ness Review, author A. D. Amer and col­leagues in their art­icle “To be a bet­ter leader, give up author­ity” make some inter­est­ing points about the rel­at­ive bene­fits to organ­isa­tions of tight­en­ing or relax­ing con­trol and author­ity dur­ing stress­ful times, such as the cur­rent global […]

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Engineering project skills for the new decade

16 January 2010

The last few dec­ades have each brought one or two major changes to the way major engin­eer­ing pro­jects are delivered, the big ques­tion now is what will the new dec­ade require of the work­force; In the 80’s that change was the arrival of design auto­ma­tion tools, such as com­pu­ter­ised design soft­ware, that led to an […]

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Selection of expat project personnel

16 January 2010

When you need to send your people over­seas for exten­ded pro­ject deploy­ments, how do you pick the right ones? Much of the early part of my career was spent work­ing as an expat rep­res­ent­at­ive of my par­ent com­pany in vari­ous parts of the world in small, tight knit teams of engin­eers, man­agers and sup­port per­son­nel. In […]

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From the beginning

16 January 2010

At some early stage in the plan­ning of a pro­ject, decisions are made as to where the pro­ject work will be executed, regard­less of the nature of the pro­ject, this decision is some­times as simple as which office the whole pro­ject will be executed in and may become as com­plex as to involve decisions covering […]

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