It’s a common scenario. You are managing a project and something goes wrong. You are following the established processes, take corrective actions and institute preventative actions to mitigate future risks. Irrespective of what actions you take, there is always a stakeholder (and there is always at least one) that will persistently raise questions and make comments like:

“I’m sure I’ve asked for this functionality to be included, we discussed it 6 months ago, and I can’t understand how come just now you realised it is not covered”
“We need to get to …

In my previous post, ‘It’s about communication, stupid’, I have introduced the idea that the single most productive way to increase the project manager’s overall effectiveness and efficiency is by focusing on increasing the PM’s communication skills. The premise behind this assertion is that although communication is an activity carried out by the listener, the responsibility to ensure the message does get across lies with the speaker. In the context of project management, it is the responsibility of the project manager to ensure that his/her communication is correctly accepted by …

Over the past few months I’ve been conducting an unofficial survey amongst professional colleagues and friends where I sought to obtain their response to the following question: “In your professional history, in those instances where you have been reporting to another manager, can you recall whether or not your manager has taken concrete, planned, actions aimed at progressing your professional career?” In other words, what I set up to investigate was whether or not people on my professional network have had positive experience with their managers, where their managers have …