Teachable Moments: A Graph is Worth a Thousand Words

Marc Cadden, PMP and PMI-ACP, is a coach who happens to be an IT PM by trade. Marc began his career as a programmer/analyst and now works with a team of motivated individuals to achieve a shared objective while watching out for the company and his team. With over 15 years of experience, Marc's key strengths are in communication, mentoring and development.

 

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

As the new lead for a technical team, I had a staff member who felt that management was not listening to warnings of impending danger. He had produced 25 multi-colored line graphs that showed the health of the databases within his responsibility. When I took the stack to the director’s secretary to include with the executive report, it was thrown away because the executives found the charts uninformative and worthless.

Since the graphs contained so much detail and information, I could understand their perception, as I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them! Knowing my team member was hurt and didn’t feel valued by management, I asked him to reorganize the graphs and only chart our five major lines of business.

The result was shocking. And, after reviewing the re-designed graphs, the manager and director were equally shocked. By the end of that afternoon, senior management had approved a $100,000 project to head off the disaster my team member had been warning about. He now felt valued …

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