Presentation Recap: From Projects to Products – Redefining Roles in the Modern Workplace
Categories:
PMXPO
Categories: PMXPO
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In March, Dr. Vanita Ahuja and I co-presented at PMI's PMXPO 2025. This was a great event with featured speakers, exhibits, and networking activities. Our presentation, "From Projects to Products: Redefining Roles in the Modern Workplace,” focused on two project professionals with interesting yet distinct transitions from a product manager/owner to a project/program manager. With the rise of product management and product-led organizational strategies, strong collaboration between product and project managers has become essential. PMI's recent Maximizing Project Success research shows that 39% of respondents' most recent projects were in product development, indicating these roles frequently interact in organizations today. Project managers provide essential skills that enable teams to deliver products efficiently and effectively while meeting customer expectations. Their ability to adapt, lead, and drive results ensures they remain indispensable in an evolving landscape where the distinction between product and project continues to blur. At the conclusion of this session, are goals were to: Q&A During my presentation, I received a lot of great questions that we didn’t get a chance to cover, and my responses are below. Question: Are diverse industries truly ready to embrace candidates transitioning from other domains? Despite my qualifications and PMP, I’m hitting roadblocks. Question: Is transitioning from project to product management harder than the reverse? How do we gain credibility and domain knowledge? Question: How do project and product management intersect and evolve together? Question: What are the unique skills for each role versus shared ones? Where can we go to develop these? Question: How do roles shift between project managers and product owners in today’s job market? Question: What approaches can a PM take to transition into a product management role? As a personal retrospective, the above hindsight and insights draw on years of personal, subjective, and, at times, haphazard journey across product, project, and hybrid roles—blending structured frameworks with agile adaptability. In summary, I hope these detailed perspectives inspire you to apply the principles in your own context while exploring the boundless intersection between strategy and execution. I had a great time presenting, and the full presentation will be on demand through 31 January 2026. Visit PMI's PMXPO 2025 for more details! |
Presentation Recap: Emotional Intelligence Case Study in the Scottish Construction Industry
Categories:
PMXPO
Categories: PMXPO
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During PMI’s PMXPO 2025 virtual event, I had the distinct honour of delivering a thought-provoking and insightful seminal presentation. This event was exemplary, featuring distinguished speakers, exhibitions, and a variety of networking activities. My presentation, "Association Between Emotional Intelligence and Project Professionals’ Perception: A Case Study of Scottish Construction Project Success," focused on the persistent challenges faced by the construction industry in Scotland. A significant proportion of project failures can be attributed to human factors such as ineffective communication, conflict management, and skill gaps. Despite these challenges, 55% of construction professionals are unfamiliar with the concept of emotional intelligence (EI). Research indicates that 70% of project success depends on the clear communication of objectives; however, 55% of construction professionals remain unaware of EI and its impact. This presentation emphasises the crucial role of emotional intelligence in fostering project success by enhancing leadership effectiveness, promoting team collaboration, and facilitating effective conflict resolution. Through the analysis of survey data, this study elucidates the correlation between EI competence and professional experience, demonstrating that higher levels of EI contribute to improved project performance and reduced workplace conflicts. What is the problem that needs to be solved? The primary issue that requires attention is the elevated rate of project failures within the Scottish construction industry, predominantly attributed to human-related factors such as suboptimal communication, inadequate conflict resolution, and insufficient leadership capabilities. Research indicates that while 70% of project success is contingent upon effective communication, a notable proportion of construction professionals (55%) remain unaware of emotional intelligence (EI) and its influence on project management. The industry continues to prioritise technical competencies over interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, resulting in barriers in team collaboration, stakeholder management, and ethical decision-making processes. In the absence of integrating holistic EI competencies for uptake and application into project management practices, construction professionals encounter difficulties in navigating conflicts, adapting to project complexities, and achieving successful project outcomes. Key Takeaways Key takeaways from my presentation emphasise the necessity of integrating EI training into construction project management to develop critical soft skills. Case studies illustrate real-world applications where EI fosters better client relations, effective communication among stakeholders, team cohesion, and improved self-awareness, self-management, relationship management, social awareness, and enhanced decision-making. The discussion concludes with a call to action: construction professionals must prioritise EI development to enhance productivity, reduce project failures, and create a more inclusive and collaborative work environment. While EI is not a panacea for all project challenges, it is a pivotal competency for sustainable project success. Always remember this model: Code IOI.E.
During my presentation, I received many great questions that we did not have a chance to cover, and my responses are provided below. Real-Life Scenario: Lack of Emotional Intelligence in a Construction Project Project Overview:
The Situation: Four Key Events: 1. Communication Breakdown:
2. Conflict Escalation:
3. Impact on Project Team:
4. Client Relationship Strain:
Consequences:
Key Lessons:
How can I work on emotional intelligence? Developing emotional intelligence involves strengthening four core areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. To build self-awareness, engage in daily reflection to identify emotional triggers and patterns, and ask for feedback to gain perspective on how your emotions affect others. For self-management, practice pausing before responding in emotionally charged situations, use calming techniques like deep breathing, and prepare strategies for common triggers. These habits help you regulate your emotions rather than reacting impulsively, especially under stress. Social awareness and relationship management are about understanding and connecting with others. Improve social awareness by observing body language, listening actively, and recognising emotional cues that may not be spoken. To strengthen relationship management, give constructive feedback using respectful frameworks (like Situation–Behaviour–Impact), hold regular check-ins with team members, colleagues, clients, or stakeholders, and prioritise empathy in conflicts. These skills foster trust, collaboration, and more effective teamwork, which are crucial for success in high-pressure professional environments such as construction and project management. I had a great time presenting, and the full presentation will be available on demand through January 31, 2026 on PMI's PMXPO 2025 site. |
Presentation Recap: Integrating Change Management for Successful System Implementation
Categories:
PMXPO
Categories: PMXPO
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By: Aneliya Chervenova, PMP, DASSM Last month, I presented at the Project Management Institute’s PMXPO 2024 event, held on 21 March. This was a great event with featured speakers, exhibits and networking activities. My presentation Integrating Change Management for Successful System Implementation dove into the heart of what makes or breaks the adoption of new systems within organizations. In our fast-paced world, the only constant is change. Yet, the sobering reality remains that a significant number of system implementation projects fail to meet their objectives, not due to technical inadequacies, but because of the human element - resistance to change. During the session, I was exploring the critical importance of integrating change management principles from the onset of the project lifecycle to ensure not just adoption, but successful optimization of new systems. Here are the key takeaways from the session:
During my presentation, I received a lot of great questions that we didn’t get the chance to cover, and my responses are below. Q: The phrase “new ways of working” has been mentioned a couple of times. What does this mean in this context?
Q: Any recommendations on how early to start engaging impacted parties, particularly when the questions you know they’ll ask are related to development items that are still in flux?
Remember, early engagement sets the tone for a successful implementation. By involving stakeholders from the outset, you build a foundation of collaboration and alignment. Q: Where does change readiness come into play?
1. Prepare Approach:
2. Manage Change:
3. Sustain Outcome:
In summary, change readiness ensures that the end users are well prepared to embrace the new system throughout all phases, leading to successful implementation and sustained outcomes. Q: The change plan seems to assume a lot of very thorough and detailed knowledge of the business to anticipate impact. How do you test to determine if the knowledge is sufficient before trying to determine impacts?
I had a great time presenting, and the full presentation will be on demand through 31 January, 2025. Visit PMI’s PMXPO 2024 for more details. |
Presentation Recap: Managing Your Career Path Like a Project
Categories:
PMXPO
Categories: PMXPO
| By: Tyler Norman, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP I recently presented at the Project Management Institute's PMXPO 2024 event, held on 21 March. This was a great event with featured speakers, exhibits and networking activities. My presentation, Managing Your Career Path Like a Project, focused on using the project management skills you apply in your day-to-day project management activities to take hold of your career planning process. Starting with a problem statement on realities for today's average employee, this session laid out a framework and methodology for:
Lastly, the session concluded with some steps to supercharge your career-planning process, including a few you could begin today. Key takeaways included dedicating a minimum of one hour per week to career development, how to build a funnel of mentorship opportunities, to tell your boss directly what opportunities you want, and to embrace opportunities outside of your comfort zone. During my presentation, I received a lot of great questions that we didn’t get a chance to cover, and my responses are below. Q: What advice would you give for implementing a system-wide revamp towards providing all your workforce with these powerful career development skillsets? A: The best advice I would have for deployment of these methodologies across a broader population would be to share the principles in a fundamental way and with guidance on how to tailor approaches for your staff (who undoubtedly vary in background and skill sets). Next, I would regularly revisit the principles and perhaps even organize smaller working groups to share notes and reinforce behaviors. Q: The core here is consistency - how did you stay consistent with this practice? A: The key to maintaining consistency is to systematize these practices, keeping the effort to regularly perform them low. If you make the process a major time and effort lift, it will risk consistency, as it will be more difficult to fit into your schedule. Lastly, be forgiving to yourself. If you miss a period of time, don’t feel that you've lost all progress, but simply pick back up where you left off and continue to build upon yourself. Q: How do we select a trusted advisor? A: Finding trusted advisors is a lot like finding best friends. It generally happens organically and is built upon foundational relationships of trust and mentorship. Ask yourself, "Who would I go to if I were facing a challenge in the workplace and wanted to bounce some ideas off of another person I trust?" and you're likely on the right track. Q: Do you have any suggestions for someone who is changing careers into project management? A: The principles shared apply, but could be tailored for the specific skillsets required from project managers. Survey project manager roles with companies you would like to work for, and note commonly-listed requirements that you may not have and can target for obtaining. One way to super-charge this transition would be in seeking project management learnings, such as the many offered by PMI. Q: How do you find mentee opportunities? A: Joining your local PMI chapter is a great place to start, as many chapters facilitate mentorship programs. Beyond that, identify contacts that you believe you can learn from and ask for mentorship in ways that are low stakes and low time commitment in nature, such as coffee meetings or starting with electronic correspondence. Closing I had a great time presenting, and the full presentation will be on demand through 31 January 2025. Visit PMI's PMXPO 2024 for more details. |
From Pre-mortems to PM Tools, Follow These Tips for Better Project Management
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By: Nick Sonnenberg In March, I had the honor of joining Kara Austin at the PMXPO Virtual Experience Series for the Book Club presentation (which you can still see on demand through January 31, 2024). I spoke about my book Come Up for Air, and continued the conversation in this blog in May when I answered some questions about changing “free for all” meeting attendance, work management tech systems, and getting your inbox to zero. Now it’s time for another round of Q&As that came from my session, where I address passion projects, overcoming obstacles, skill development and more! 1. What project have you worked on that you were most passionate about? We had projects for marketing, and then within that we had all the different marketing activities and initiatives like blogs and podcasts and ink articles; and then for actually writing the book, that was a separate project. So all of these various projects had all these milestones and tasks in there, which is where we collaborated. All those ultimately lived in a Come Up for Air portfolio, which housed all the projects. So in one place, we could see everything that needed to happen, all the milestones that we were going to hit. And yeah, it took a village to get this done, but if we didn't have it organized, it probably wouldn't have gotten done. 2. What obstacles did you need to overcome for this project to be a success? 3. How did you overcome those challenges? I also have a fantastic team. I probably spent over 1,000 hours on this book, but if it weren't for having a full-time head of content on my team that wrote a lot of the book…I might have been able to still write a book, but it definitely wouldn't have been to the quality that you see it today. So I would say have a great team, have great systems. Ultimately, I think it's that simple—but it's not easy all the time to execute on. 4. What advice do you have, or what key lessons have you learned that have helped you manage projects better? You know, a lot of people do post-mortems after projects where you reflect on what went well, what didn't go well, what was learned for the next time. But you might even want to consider a pre-mortem, where you sit down and say, “Okay, we got a book coming out February 2023. The goal is to hit the bestseller list. Now let's imagine that we don't.” And we start analyzing why we don't. You start having that conversation on the front end. Across companies that we've seen, some teams do this—thinking through what the risks and challenges are, why we might not succeed. And having that conversation up front is so valuable. And having a project manager on the project, or someone that's responsible for making sure that the project's hygienic and that there's not a bunch of things past due, I think is critical as well. So in summary: Have you established roles and responsibilities to really kick it off properly with why are you doing this? What's the success criteria? In general, I like to think through the milestones that we need to be hitting before starting to think about all the minutiae, all the tasks. So on that kickoff call, we'll go through the high-level stuff, and then we'll start going from like 30,000 feet to 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet. Meaning, what are the milestones that we need to start hitting and laying out in order to achieve that bigger goal of completing the project? Once you get that, then we start thinking about what tasks we need to hit those milestones. 5. What skills do you think are most important for project management? So you need those qualities of follow-through in an organization, but in the future it's gonna be more and more critical that you know how to use these more modern tools. 6. How would you recommend acquiring skills that someone might not have yet? But there's a lot of free stuff online that people could just start Googling, honestly—Google is your friend. There are books out there. There's my book. PMI has some fantastic books, too. So, you know, there's some cheap solutions out there to really get started and inexpensively accelerate your learning. 7. What is your moonshot idea that you would love to assemble a team around and make reality? And so in the future, what I envision Leverage doing is building technology. So imagine a bot that's living in your Slack or your Microsoft Teams or whatever your internal communication tool is, and that tool is connected to all of these other core tools that you use to collaborate—all these modern tools that kind of fit into my CPR framework that I talk about. Well, there's some common best practices that we teach that we could code and have a bot ping you and say, “Hey Kara, we notice that you have this many past-due tasks…”; or, “We notice that you haven't been getting to inbox zero in your email”; or, “Here’s a little video to remind you of what we've talked about before. And if you need some help, you could read this article or watch this video.” So I think building some SaaS component to how we're training and consulting that connects to all these tools and tells you exactly where you’re missing the opportunity to be more efficient is the direction that we're going in. |









