These are field notes from more than 25 years of running high-stakes projects and building the teams behind them. Every post starts with a real problem from a real job: scope that drifted, a vendor lock that held, a handoff that broke, or a schedule that stayed honest. Use them the way I wrote them, as working tools you can bring to your next project meeting.
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Team performance management might seem like a fantastical idea consisting of lists, expectations, and lofty goals, but it’s so much more. In its purest form, it’s about showing your team they can exceed the limits they’ve set for themselves and that they have way more potential than they realize. It’s…
A team lead and a manager are different jobs, even though plenty of org charts blur the two. In a typical org structure, the team lead sits in the frontline layer, working inside the team and usually without hiring, firing, or budget authority, while the manager sits a level up…
Developing a team is a tentative, complicated process, but building a virtual team is even more tricky. More often than not, management is suddenly called to put a team together that can work remotely. They are asked to change everything about the way they work as well as everything about…
Team management is a tricky balance between motivation, control, and support. But when you add dispersion to the mix, things get a lot more complicated. Managing virtual teams that rarely meet in person and can span across the globe is an amazing feat of technology and progress, but it still…
As with most things, your efforts will be scrambled when you work without intention. Without direction, you can easily get stuck moving in circles. Team management is no different. When handled without direction, intention, goals, and care, a team transforms from a resource into a liability. They could be moving…
Every single day, we communicate. Unless you are out on the fringes of society, you exchange some kind of a message with someone every day of your life. Even for those on the edge, you’ve probably scared off a bird or two—and that counts. And over the course of our…
Agile project management has a weird reputation. Some see it as a “magic” solution that suddenly makes all their problems disappear. Some see it as the work of satan that can’t be trusted and will lead to the immediate demise of your company. We think the real answer lies somewhere…
Risk management in a project protects one job’s scope, schedule, and budget until closeout. Risk management in business protects the whole company over the long haul, and owners feel the gap when a project risk turns into a business problem nobody planned for. In this piece, we are going to…
Effective stakeholder management has no one face. For each project, a handful of stakeholder groups have all kinds of requirements at all times. You’ll have those with high levels of power and interest who want to know everything. You’ll have the opposite. Then, you’ll see stakeholders who have very specific…