On Being Patiently Persistent

Michelle Stronach has over 20 years of experience in the project management field, with experience creating successful PMOs and implementing project, portfolio management and IT governance frameworks. Michelle truly appreciates the value of feedback and welcomes comments on her articles. https://twitter.com/mlstronach

  Communications Management   Governance   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Talent Management  

People who have known me for a while tell me that I am the most patient person they know--persistently patient, in fact. I agree with that; it’s perhaps part of my nature, but I like to think it as patiently persistent. I also think that being persistently patient and patiently persistent makes me good at what I do.

We’ve all heard the expression that project management is like herding kittens. Projects would be easy if the team was all one person--all of the same mind (the team would be kind of like the Borg from Star Trek). We wouldn’t have team members going off track, distracted by other work or their own way of doing things. We wouldn’t have team members wanting to jump ahead and start “doing” without spending time planning what we have to do or how we should be doing it. And we most definitely wouldn’t have conflicts amongst ourselves. Then again, the project would probably be boring and result in something unimaginative--something like a Borg square box.

As project managers, we need individuals to have their own mind so that the team has the advantage of diverse thought and, when harnessed (not mind-melded), the team can creatively solve problems together. But it also means that as project managers we need to be able to guide and direct the creativity, to “align” the individual thought of the team without …

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