yes, you’re right. You can teach leadership skill but you’ll barely find it in basic PM training sessions. Anyway there is a different of putting this methods into action and knowing how you could be doing it better.

Yes there are times when you need to add more time for discussion within the project team. But there are also times when you need to take the control and tell them to stop discussing. Because sometimes we just run in circles within our debates and don’t focus any longer on the overall goals.

You make some very good points. Yes, a project manager should take responsibility. In one of my older blogs I argue that you have to be responsible, even when you lack authority.

I agree that you need passion. Any job requires passion. I’ll trade you for a person with 90% passion and 10% skill over a person with 90% expertise and 10% passion any day.

What I disagree is that you can’t teach “Leadership” and you have to get into the Drivers seat.

Driver’s Seat- Command and Control doesn’t work: If the US Military is moving away from this (or arguably never used it in many areas) then business shouldn’t either.

Can’t teach good management or leadership: Absolutely you can. Manager-Tools.com holds up that good management is boring. Regular blocking and tackling, combined with passion, can make great managers. And we don’t have to be perfect, we just have to be better than the 90% of those manager who don’t try.

If the PM lacks good leadership – the PM will suffer of acceptance by the stakeholders or team members.

If the PM has a lack of passion for the job as PM – there will be a prevailing mood that isn’t supporting your project.

All in all project management isn’t just fun and meetings, it’s hard work. If you want to become a great project manager you need to take the driver seat and take responsibility for all actions required. Even if you don’t like the decision you need to make.

Take responsibility, tell the team if you’re wrong or mistaken, lead by being a good example and never ask s.th of someone what you would not be willing to invest…

That could make you a pretty good if not excellent PM.

I’ve got concerns on the Word “Good” and some of the Personality sections.

Word Good: “In short a project that meets the business case with in a defined quality, time and budget ”

This is one of the reasons I think agile methods are gaining so much traction. It is extremely rare that requirements never change. And defining project success by the iron triangle in no way reflects projects that are wildly successful, even though they didn’t meet the original triangle constraints. And on the flip side there are far to many projects that shipped on time, on budget, in scope and we absolute failures . I believe we should be measuring success by the value a project brings to the customer and the company, not if it meets some artificial constraints set at the project start.

Personality
“A good Project Manager needs to take charge of their projects”
This is very “Command and Control” style management. Article after article and Book after Book are showing this to be a flawed style. Daniel Pink shows some great science on this in his book. In the last decade we’ve seen the ‘servant leadership’ concept to be a better way to lead. And ironically, the military’s “Command and Control” is more like agile. In the US Marines, they empower the man in the field to make the decisions. The generals just give the objective and constraints, they don’t tell you how to secure that beachhead. Empower the team as a project manager and you’ll go a lot farther.

“Good Projects Managers are often born logical and analytical.”
If you’re job is to “run” the project and be the sole “throat to choke” then sure, logic probably makes sense. But if you’re going to be a leader who empowers the team to be better, you have to learn to rely much more on relationship and people interactions. Logic doesn’t factor into emotional conversations very well. I’m an art major and fiction writer and I know my ability to tackle problems from a creative angle makes me a better PM.

Best, Joel BC

Muddying and mixing the roles does not result in quality outcomes.

Your definition of ‘Project Manager’ is good though in the wider market place the role is very often mixed with another. As these muddied waters are cleared more ‘good’ PM’s will come to the fore.

Deanne

Most adverts state if you did not have feedback in say 14 days, your application was not successful.

I like your perspective and predictions – intuition is more what I would call it since this is driven by your experiences and observations.

I am curious. As a project management professional, what are some of the most common causes of project failures? And, how do you keep them from failing? Do you have some tools that help you stay on top of it all by giving you data-driven advise – a true prediction of what to expect based on where you have been,

We would love to show a simple, web-based tool for managing projects that also builds in a data-driven predictions of the success of the projects, I call it the “cone of confidence”. Its continuous, its automatic, and its valuable information. Check out http://alvazan.com for a FREE trial.

I would be interested in your thoughts and professional opinion on the value of such tools in terms of changing the way projects are managed and improving the percentage of successful projects.

k

I’ve also come to the same conclusions and know how I’d like to use Twitter, however what I’d like to do and what I can do sometimes conflict! Specifically, comparing personal and business accounts (I run both), as a person it’s easy to throw in daily anecdotes and thoughts (sometimes too easy) alongside the ‘giving’ tweets. In fact I have no need to promote myself on my private account – it’s all for fun and I’ve a surprisingly large following given that I’m not even that active! For the business account on the other hand, the use of the company name seems to exclude the ability to post randomly about the weather, sport, what I had for breakfast or whatever. It would somehow seem unprofessional. So, unfortunately the emphasis is much more on promotion – definitely too much so and with a risk of accumulating some ‘unfollowers’… Meanwhile, I badger and berate directors and associates for blogs (none ), insights and their personal anecdotes (preferably at least mildly business related) – and retweet their comments from their own personal tweets on the company twitter account. The other approach is to review related Google Alerts stories and other’s tweets in order to share related stories – and hopefully there are enough to encourage followers to remain!

It’s a hard balance to get right – but I think I have similar New Year Resolutions to you!

Cheers.