Guest Blog: 'Projects Are About People: Using Your Emotional Intelligence'

You are a Project Manager. You may not realize it, and you may have some other title engraved on your business card, but believe me—you are. Envision a Saturday morning. Paint brush in hand, in-laws arriving tomorrow, and you angry at the realization that there’s not enough paint to finish the guest room. Your spouse is standing by, volunteering well-intentioned guidance “Don’t fall off that ladder!” 

At this very moment, you are a Project Manager, trust me.

What’s more, I can predict the outcome of this project is based in large part on the very next thing you do. It’s not whether you actually fall off that ladder, or whether you’re able to get more of the custom-colored paint. Sure, you’ll need to address those things… but the real predictor of how your day’s going to unfold is what you say next to your spouse:

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Guest Blog: 'Don't be ambushed by rework! Build it into your project plan.'

In my classes, I like to tell my students that stakeholders are like new puppies in the backyard:  They gotta mark their territory and leave their scent on everything they see! They need to make the project deliverables their own by adjusting them, changing them, reinterpreting them, and otherwise “branding” them with their own perspectives. In other words, if they are doing what you want them to do — actively engaging with your team and with your project’s deliverables as they are evolving — they are absolutely guaranteed to make modifications and adjustments as they begin to “own” the project’s outputs. And that’s a good thing! You want this kind of ownership to help assure the success of your project’s finished work products when they are finally turned over to the users.

The down side of this, however, is that it leads to rework as you make all the suggested revisions.  

The key question for you, as project manager, is this:  Will you accommodate this stakeholder-generated rework by formally building it into the project plan or will you simply be ambushed by it when the stakeholders surprise you with all their divergent feedback at your review sessions?

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Tom's Planner is a Green Certified Site

At Tom's Planner we think it is important to be as environmentally friendly as possible in our daily life and that is why Tom's Planner is now Green Certified by CO2Stats. CO2Stats calculates the combined electricity used by computers visiting this site, the servers providing it, and the networks that connect them. CO2Stats automatically neutralizes the carbon emissions due to generation of that electricity.

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