When I look down at my To Do list some days, I notice that maybe a third to a half of my actual assignments are someone else’s. I find it sort of funny to think, “have I become that person who? AM I A PAIN?”
It’s okay, I’ve gotten over those feelings, but it hasn’t been without some experience to find out that following up with people and holding them accountable for their own work is part of the job in project management.
I recently gave my “Project Management for Humans (No Robots Allowed)” talk at Web Design Day in Pittsburgh.
I loved Pittsburgh. I have not been there in a really long time, and was really impressed by the city. But, really, I was most impressed by what seemed to be a really friendly, passionate web community. These guys showed up for a full day event on a Saturday and stayed engaged all day long. The (other) speakers were great, so I guess that wasn’t too hard to do! Continue reading
We just completed a project with the most aggressive timeline I have ever had the pleasure to plan and manage. It would have been a complete displeasure had everything not gone so well. It might not sound so rough in writing, but we designed and deployed a blog for a brand new client in under 10 days.
Two days after launch, I am sitting at my desk, going back to the site to make sure we didn’t miss something, thinking “what happened here?” or “how did we pull it off?” Here’s why I think we did it: Continue reading
I just wrote an article about connecting with your clients over at Projects at Work, which is a great site for project management professionals. There is a lot of great content published on the site (ahem), and there is the capability to connect with other project managers. They just redesigned, and I think the site has a lot of promise. So, check it out and register for an account!
The article is all about what I do to make sure I am keeping up my end of the deal, project management-wise and having fun on the job, meeting new people (clients) and just being myself. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it can be accomplished. Please check it out!
I’ve got a couple more article to be published outside of this blog. I’ll mention them here when they’re published.
All projects operate on some sort of budget, and the work that we do as project managers is scoped as a part of that budget. It’s hard to measure a lot of what we do, because there are few “deliverables” tied to managing a project. But how do you estimate the time you need to manage a project when there are so many variables, like changing timelines, client requests, team meetings, and so on?
For any other work, a budget is a budget and you need to work with it, right? The same can be said for project management. We need to do what is right for the client and the project, and keep our work within the constraints of the project budget. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I have hit my hours budgets on projects earlier than expected, or have seen a trend toward using my hours before a project is done. I had to take a deeper look at what I was doing on those projects to see just where the time was going. It’s true, you read it here first: I’m not perfect. I completely exhaust budget hours! (If you don’t, you must have some amazing budgets to work with.) Continue reading
