Interview with Commsabilities

A couple of months ago I had the honour of being asked by Jo Ann Sweeney of Sweeney Communications Ltd to participate in an interview. She was interviewing a number of project management practitioners across the globe for a series of articles on communication skills. The group she chose to interview were all highly skilled individuals with many years of project experience in different parts of the globe and I was delighted to be included on her list. The result of her efforts is an excellent series of blog posts covering the top 5 communication skills for project managers - active listening, building relationships based on trust, setting clear priorities and enabling collaboration.

Not only was being interviewed by Jo Ann a great opportunity to share my thoughts and experiences in a different forum, it was also very interesting to read the finished articles and see just how similar the combined groups opinions, beliefs and ideas actually were. So while our project and organisational challenges may come in various shapes and sizes, underneath it all they're really not that different.

As well as her series of blog posts Jo Ann wrote a summary article called “5 Essential Rules for Project Leaders”, which was published on the PMI (Project Management Institute) website. To keep up with her latest publications subscribe to her RSS feed and if you're part of the Twitter world add her to your follow list. I have!

Thanks again Jo Ann.

Busting the Myth of 'It's different here'

Companies, Projects, are they really any different from one country to another? I say NO! and having recently returned from foreign shores I thought it might be time to bust the myth that exists with ‘but it’s different here’.

Let’s go on a small journey and take a look at you, the company.

The Value of Values

Values, everyone has them whether they’re written down or not. Some are negative and some are positive. It’s belief in them that gives them credibility and establishes their value. Where a mission statement defines a company’s purpose, it is the values that help define the behaviours it wants exhibited in order to achieve the mission. Companies can spend ridiculously large sums of money defining, documenting and displaying their values. They’re often quick to capitalise both internally to staff and externally to their market, when they (usually senior management or executives) are displaying those carefully crafted values. Yet it’s interesting to observe how much faster they are to minimise, possibly even ignore, when they’re not. Dare I suggest these often very expensive values only have value when it suits?

Podcast with Guerrilla Project Management

Earlier this year I was absolutely delighted to be interviewed by Samad Aidane for his Guerrilla Project Management podcast. Samad is not only a genuine and generous guy who I'm honoured to know, he's also a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with over 15 years of IT experience. His Guerrilla Project Management blog is the place for "conversations about the mindset that Project Managers must adopt to be able to effectively manage today’s complex projects".

An experienced and good PM is always prepared and Samad proved this 10 fold with his prep work. He didn't just flick a few questions through on an email, oh no; Samad had absolutely done his homework and identified exactly the pieces from my articles he thought would interest his audience. I'm just glad he forwarded them to me so I had sufficient time to get my responses into some semblance of order!

Figuring out our time zones was probably the most difficult part as Samad made our interview together feel like we were having a normal conversation. Go listen and while you're there subscribe to his RSS feed, listen to his other podcasts and read through his various blog posts. You won't regret it.