Project Management

Upon meeting someone for the first time and them asking me where I went to school, I will typically get one of three reactions when I reply that I went to the University of Notre Dame: 1) They love Notre Dame because they are Irish or Catholic or grew up watching the football team, 2) They don’t particularly care for Notre Dame but respect it as a good school, or 3) They don’t like Notre Dame at all and no description about what Notre Dame embodies (hint, it’s not football) will cause them to view in a different light. Sadly, the third response is the most common. I feel it is somewhat similar when telling a prospective client about outsourced…

Published in the December 2019 Edition of pmmagazine.net This month’s pmmagazine topic led me to recall a story relayed to me during some Conflict Negotiation training that I participated in several years ago. The story was an actual mediation case and went something like this… Two neighbors were separated by a fence running between each person’s driveway. One day, a limb from a tree located on Neighbor A’s property, but overhanging onto Neighbor B’s property, fell and damaged the fence and Neighbor B’s car. An argument then ensued with Neighbor B claiming that he had previously told Neighbor A about that branch being dead and that it was Neighbor A’s responsibility as the owner of the tree to pay for…

Published in the June 2019 Edition of pmmagazine.net The consequences of poor risk management can be catastrophic. In just the last 15 years, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis of 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, and the Fukushima nuclear crisis all stem, at least in some part, from risk management failures. As recently as 2018, Wells Fargo agreed to a $1 billion settlement when federal regulators cited a lack of effective risk management as the root cause of their scandal involving unauthorized creation of consumer accounts. While the maturity and awareness of risk management within organizations continues to increase globally, are we to the point that organizations are embracing its value? Has there been a paradigm shift in culture…

I believe that everybody has some calling in this world, and a set of skills and traits that are well suited to that calling. Conversely, and specifically with regards to project management, I believe that too many people are put into that role when it is a poor fit. These situations ultimately result in rework, extra costs, schedule delays, employee morale issues, frustration, and often failure. Project management should be viewed as a specialty, and one requiring a rather unique set of skills to achieve excellence. It should not be viewed as a role that many in your organization can fill, a role that a technical specialist can handle because he/she has a good relationship with the client, or as…

Published in the November 2018 Edition of pmmagazine.net Some view project management as no more valuable than other skills. Others have felt the pain of a project that was managed poorly. A few can attest to outcomes that they did not realize were possible because of a top-performing project manager (PM). Whatever your view, research shows that firms with a higher level of project management maturity deliver better results. As reported in the Project Management Institute’s 2018 Pulse of the Profession, high-performing organizations, when compared to low-performing ones, have higher project success rates (92% versus 32%) and waste 21 times less money due to poor project performance. Here are Dextra’s top five reasons for why you should value project management:…