required to be successful. It is not about public relations and motivational speech; it is all about doing enjoyable work and achieving your goal.
Talk and promises slip off the tongue easily but delivering on your promises is sometimes very difficult and it often requires strength of character and strong leadership to achieve the right result.
No-one can lead their working life without being confronted by failure but as long as you learn from it there is no reason why you cannot be a good project manager. This blog is designed to encourage you to apply common sense, leadership and simple techniques to overcome managerial problems.
Let me get one thing of my chest: I cannot stand euphemisms. One of the most egregious euphemisms is to call a problem a challenge. I hear this all the time: on news reports and breakfast programmes or coming out of the mouths of politicians and business leaders. "Challenge" is seen to be a positive word and "problem" is seen to be negative; so heaven forbid if you appear to be negative. This attitude is nonsense and if you do not recognise that you have a problem then you will not be able to solve it. The challenge is to solve the problem which will not go away unless you take some action rather than mouthing trite euphemisms.
This blog is not about how to use processes to get your project done. Hundreds of books have been written about how to run a project and you can always go on a course. No one realises, more than me, the importance of applying standards and the correct process to get something done. In the past I have written standards about how to do work and I have designed hundreds of processes about how to do business operations but all of them have been short and to the point. There is, however, no book or process which can tell you how to have the courage, common sense and integrity to be a leader as you have to learn this yourself by experience.
I have just finishing reading "Carrying the Fire" by Michael Collins who was the command module pilot of Apollo 11. One the greatest successful projects ever attempted was achieved with minimal computing power on both the spaceship and on the ground. Nowhere in the book does Michael Collins mention Prince methodology or ISO 9001 quality certification and they still got to the moon. I wonder why? Perhaps being methodical and quality conscious was a way of life rather than a prescriptive text. The pilots had plenty of operating procedures to be mindful of just to get themselves off the ground without the extra burden of quite often unnecessary administration and bureaucracy. While we are talking about astronauts, how would mission control have responded if James Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander, had said "hey Houston we've had a challenge here" rather than "hey Houston we've had a problem here", when the oxygen tanks in the service module blew up? I suggest that they might not have made it back safely. Common sense and straight talking got them back home. All communication with the pilots was directed through one man, another astronaut, there was no room for a conference call facility - simple human communication techniques were deployed to control mankind's most ambitious and complex programme and all of its projects.
I am not a Luddite and I am an enthusiastic advocate of the efficient and effective application of information technology. Efficient and effective are the key words, for if technology is not applied with common sense and hard headed thinking the results are often administrative chaos and the failure to meet objectives.
Project Managers need to be something more than a job description. They are leaders, they need to operate for a common purpose and for the common good. They need to be excellent communicators who can orchestrate and organise all the elements of a project or programme to meet the business purpose and objectives. They need to act with integrity and not be self serving and above all they need to act with a sense of duty and responsibility to their profession. This is what this blog is all about.
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