By Lynda Bourne
By Christian Bisson, PMP
Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Why Certifications Matter (to Me)
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By Conrado Morlan The number of credentials offered by professional associations, hardware and software vendors and other organizations has grown sharply in the last decade. So have the number of credential holders. There’s much to be said for certifications. Many companies require a certification to advance along their career path. In addition, salary surveys show that, overall, credential holders earn more. On the other hand, some professionals and employers are not fans of certifications. They argue that many people have forged a career and reputation without them, that accelerated changes in science, technology and government regulations makes certifications hard to maintain, and that the cost and time of pursuing credentials are too high. I see the value of certifications from two perspectives: the value given by the credential itself, and the value of my contributions to the credential. The value given by the certification is the importance of the knowledge gained through earning it, the reputation of the institution or professional association that awards it, and the certification’s years on the market. The value of my contributions to the credential has to do with how it engages me to actively research trends within my profession. This process can help experienced practitioners turn into thought leaders who share their experiences leading and managing projects across the globe. In other words, the value of a certification can cascade beyond the credential holder. Knowledge is shared with other practitioners, helping them to advance in the profession. Yes, it’s true that some credential holders fall behind and don’t keep up with the latest knowledge and/or renew their credential. Other credential holders don’t follow the established code of ethics, which harms the reputation and value of the credential. But such misbehavior or lack of up-to-date knowledge isn’t the fault of the credential or the credential-awarding organization. PMI, for example, has a strict renewal process for the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification that requires certification holders to earn a specific number of credits per cycle to keep the credential current. And over the 30+ years since the PMP was created, those requirements have been updated to cover market and industry demands. You may be wondering why I didn’t mention the cost of certifications, and whether they’re worth paying. To me, it’s a no-brainer. I take my professional development personally and always recall former Harvard University President Derek Bok’s quote, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” If you’re a certification holder, how do you measure its value? |
Managing for an Uncertain Future
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By Wanda Curlee Marisa Silva, “the Lucky PM,” recently published a five-part series on portfolio management, “Thinking Outside the Triangle: Project Portfolio Foresight.” What intrigued me in the series were her thoughts about the future. She aptly points out that the project management discipline is about helping to understand the future. But the future, of course, is anything but predictable. Project, program and portfolio managers take different views of the future. The project manager is at a tactical level and focuses on moving one project to its successful conclusion, or the future. Throughout the project, the project manager attempts to keep it on track. However, Marisa stresses that the project manager needs to think beyond the golden triangle of scope, timeline and budget by assessing the external environment and how it affects the project. For example, imagine you’re a project manager leading a large, complex project. The project is key to the organization updating its antiquated systems. The vendor is about to announce a revolutionary change to the product that the project is implementing. What do you do? This affects your future and the company’s. At the next level, the program manager is orchestrating a group of projects to deliver a complex environment and a single benefit or a set of interim benefits. Again, the program manager is gazing into the future to deliver these projects and benefits. He or she is constantly re-evaluating how to maximize the benefit for the company via the set of projects. Finally, the portfolio manager takes a disparate set of projects/programs, maps them to strategy and then works magic to move the company from an “as-is” strategy state to the “to-be” strategy state envisioned by the leader of the organization. Simple, right? Absolutely not. The portfolio manager is consistently looking at how to optimize the portfolio to keep within risk tolerance. He or she also optimizes resources to drive the best value for the company. Talk about looking into a crystal ball! But according to Marisa, even this is thinking inside the triangle. The astute portfolio manager needs to have foresight. He or she should be thinking about various visions of the future and be adaptable enough to change. In other words, portfolio managers must have situational awareness of the current world and how it can change dramatically (sometimes in an instant). They must be ready to adapt to that change. To describe the enormously complex world we now reside in, two acronyms have been coined: VUCA (vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) and DANCE (dynamic, ambiguous, nonlinear, complex and emergent). As the project, program or portfolio manager, you help your organization prepare for and adapt to an uncertain future.
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How to Motivate Your Team (Part 2)
| By Lynda Bourne In my last post, I delved into the SCARF model of cognition during a social situation. Created by Dr. David Rock, the model describes the five elements that can be a motivational reward or a threat to an individual: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness. I tackled status and certainty in part 1 and now turn to the final three elements of SCARF. Autonomy Successful autonomy feels great! You have been given a challenge and succeeded. No one likes to be micromanaged. Even in jobs that require close coordination between a number of people (think of production lines), each person—and the group as a whole—needs to feel they have some control over their destiny if you want a motivated team. The art of providing the right amount of autonomy to each team member is effective delegation. If the delegation is a stretch assignment for the person, make sure someone is available to provide coaching and support to make the learning experience enjoyable. Most people like to learn new skills but hate failing. Relatedness A feeling of relatedness is a primary reward for the brain, and an absence of relatedness is a primary threat. The feeling of relatedness is what you get when you belong to a group. Having many positive social connections (e.g., a sense of relatedness) doesn’t just increase your happiness, it can reduce your blood pressure and help you live longer. The challenge for leaders is to create an inclusive group. Just as your brain automatically classifies situations into possible rewards or threats, it does the same with people, determining, subconsciously, whether each person is a friend or foe. People you don’t know tend to be classified as foe until proven otherwise—including the new team member. Careful planning is needed to build the team initially, and then to introduce new people into a team once it has formed. How individuals relate is cultural. Some cultures and individuals are highly tactile and enjoy close physical contact—hugs and kisses on the cheek are part of the normal social processes (even in the workplace). Others expect and require more personal space. This is not a problem if everyone is from a similar background, but needs careful management if the team is made up of people from different cultures. Fairness Fairness can be more rewarding than money and is probably the only SCARF element that is almost impossible to overdo. The fact that being treated unfairly can generate a strong threat response is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone. What may be a surprise is that a sense of fairness can be significantly rewarding in and of itself. Fairness-generated emotions can run high even in mundane situations such as being short-changed at the checkout. The feeling of being taken advantage of can wreck an otherwise great day, despite the relatively insignificant money involved. The tendency to prefer equity and resist unfair outcomes is deeply rooted in people, to the extent that they are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome. It’s especially easy for people or teams to get upset by small injustices when they are tired. Therefore, leaders must ensure fairness both in fact and in perception. They need to do their best to be always seen as doing the right thing by everyone. This is no easy task! Summary All the SCARF elements crop up routinely in various theories of motivation. Dr. Rock’s contribution is to tie these factors back to the most fundamental processes in the human psyche. When a leader gets the mix right, people’s pleasure drives are engaged, serotonin and other hormones are released and they feel good. If the settings are wrong, the limbic system switches to a threat response, which triggers a fight-or-flight reaction. Either reaction occurs deep in a person’s subconscious and happens far quicker than rational thought. Therefore, the leadership challenge is to create the right environment for the team. Leaders must encourage the positive reactions that appear to lead to the creation of genuine happiness—at least in so far as happiness is driven by the chemical reactions in our brains. |
How to Motivate Your Team
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In my last post, “Is a Happy Team a Motivated Team?,” I suggested a happy project team was likely to be an outcome of a motivated team, rather than something you achieve in isolation. So this post looks at some of the key elements a project manager can use to develop a motivated team. That, in turn, should lead to a happy group of people who enjoy their work. My next post will examine even more ways to achieve this. In his book Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock defines the “SCARF” model of what happens in the brain during social situations. This model can provide useful insight into the way motivation works. While it may seem odd to some, every team, every project and every workplace is primarily a social situation. People are interacting with other people to achieve something for their stakeholders—who are also people! The SCARF model defines five elements that can be a motivational reward, or a threat to an individual:
A leader who establishes the right foundation for each of these factors will help build a successful and happy group. The challenge for a leader is that each of these factors can trigger a threat or a reward experience. Insufficient levels will cause resentment (pain). The right levels will cause pleasure. But too much of any (with the possible exception of fairness) can lead to fear or the feeling of repression (pain). The challenge for every leader is to know enough about your team members to hit the sweet spot of “just right.” Status Everyone has a deep human drive for self-esteem or competence, but this is almost never assessed on its own. We are social beings, so our sense of competence appears to be deeply connected to others. What we actually measure is status. Status means where we are positioned in relation to those around us—the pecking order. A person’s perception of status, and any changes in it, will be experienced as a reward or a threat. A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can make you feel like your life is in danger. There’s no universal scale for status. When you meet someone new and size up your relative importance, you might do so based on who is older, richer, stronger, smarter or funnier. Whatever framework you think is important, when your perceived sense of status goes up or down, an intense emotional response results. Because of this, people—and teams—go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. As Dr. Rock says, “The desire to increase status is behind many of society’s greatest achievements and some of our darker hours of destruction.” The challenge for every leader is to respect the status of all of the team members and minimize negative movements. Conversely, thrusting someone into a high-status role they are not prepared for can be equally destructive. This is why public speaking ranks as one of the biggest fears. The spotlight is on the speaker, it is a high status position, and the person is terrified of failing. Certainty A sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat response. Your brain detects something is wrong, and your ability to focus on other issues diminishes. Your brain doesn’t like uncertainty—it’s like a type of pain. Certainty, on the other hand, feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain. Effective leaders provide enough certainty for their followers to experience the feeling or reward, but not so much as to stifle creativity and innovation. Again, this is a balancing act aimed at hitting the sweet spot and needs to be tailored to the characteristics of each individual. Some people crave stability and certainty; others like a degree of challenge (but not too much). In my next post, I’ll dive into the rest of the SCARF model to finish my discussion of how to motivate people. |
4 Change Management Tips for Project Managers
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
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For project managers, change is constant—inseparable from day-to-day life. And if you work in IT, the pace of change is only getting faster. Unfortunately, human nature makes us reluctant to change. So for project managers and others who want to make change happen, here are a few tips: 1. Help people adapt No matter the type of change—whether it’s a new technology, a new process or a new methodology—the steeper the learning curve, the fewer people who will be onboard. Help people adapt to the change with these approaches:
2. Show how it’s helping THEM This tip may not apply for all the changes we want to execute. But let’s say you want to change a tool that a team uses for projects. The team’s initial reaction might be skepticism or resistance. You want to make sure that people are aware of how the changes are good for THEM—not you or management. In my example above, you could tell team members it’s going to make their overall work easier. They will have a more efficient tool that will quickly give them access to the information they need. By focusing on that when you brief the others, they will also focus on that while they are juggling their emotions toward the change. As they fight their reluctance, they can remind themselves how the new tool will help them. 3. Ask “Why?” This tip can be applied once reluctance is detected. It’s easy to insist on something or even to force it on people. But by simply asking why they are reluctant, you may learn that it’s because of simple reasons that can be mitigated. You may even find out that your idea is not as good as you thought, and you can adjust accordingly. By asking why, rather than assuming you know how the other people feel (or trying to guess), you’ll receive valuable feedback. Once a colleague was annoyed by new software we were using just because he was receiving too many notifications. I simply guided him toward the notifications preferences, and it made all the difference for him. 4. Don’t give up Stay positive, and keep it up. The tips above should be repeated as needed.
Share your tips and stories! I’m certain a lot of you are facing challenges with changes inside your teams.
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