The Importance of a Shared Vision

In a post from my series “Advice for Junior PMs“, I touched on the concept of saying what you mean when working with your project team.  The same concept should be applied when communicating outside of your project team.

There’s a fairly common graphic that gets passed around IT departments, and it’s somewhat self-deprecating.  It shows that project teams tend to not understand what the customer needs – which is endemic of lacking a shared vision.

This graphic makes me cringe every time I see it.

Why I won’t stop treating Projects as communities

What would you do if you were told to stop treating your project team like people?

I am a firm believer in mentorship to help grow my personal skills.  I will jump at every opportunity to sit down with someone more senior than myself, especially if they have worked with me, to solicit feedback on how to be more successful.

During one of the last sessions that I had with my Program Manager, I was reviewing some communication issues that I was having with a senior technical lead.  Without getting into too much detail, the senior technical lead was maliciously complying, and I kept letting him get away with it for fear of losing his focus on some fairly critical tasks.

A hike gone awry as an analogy for Troubled Project Leadership

I have two fortune cookie fortunes on my desk at home – “promise only what you can deliver” and “now is a good time to finish up old tasks.”  They are taped to the bottom of a picture frame with a picture of my wife and I from the day that she had a catastrophic accident hiking in the mountains.