Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
World-Class Lessons from World Cup Coaches
Categories:
Leadership
Categories: Leadership
| Photo: AC Moraes People around the globe are tuning in to the FIFA World Cup. Even overloaded project managers will manage to find time to watch some of the global football championship coverage and root for their team. I can't help but find parallels between what happens on the pitch and some of the challenges we face as project managers. Both successful World Cup coaches and project managers spend a lot of time giving direction to a team to mitigate unexpected events. Here are four lessons to take away from these coaches that could help ensure your project produces winning results in the face of the unforeseen: 1. Set starters and specialists. World Cup coaches know what skills key team members must have to win games. They also have intimate knowledge of their players' skills, capacities, endurance and adaptability to changing conditions. That knowledge allows coaches to pick the players they want to start the game as well as those specialists to enter the field when the key players need support. Project managers should also know who the key team members are to have at the start of a project and the specialized resources -- such as subject matter experts on the business or work planners -- needed toward project completion to ensure success. 2. Be a coach, not a player. One of the more risky tendencies for a coach is to try to teach his own playing expertise to the team members. Yet the best World Cup coaches focus on making the team perform well as a whole, not on providing detailed instruction on ball technique. Specialized coaches (for physical training or goaltending, for example) and fellow team members should provide this detailed level of instruction, leaving the World Cup coach free to direct the overall flow of the game. Project managers can do the same by identifying and employing specialized resources that can assist team members with fundamentals, such as writing good requirements and creating work plans. This frees up the project manager to focus on solving risks and issues across the project. 3. Make sure everyone knows the plays. World Cup coaches go to great lengths to employ existing plays that are a good match for their players. In addition, they spend time creating new plays that can be used in unexpected conditions that can come up during a game. The World Cup coach spends a lot of preparation and practice time with the team making sure the plays are executed in a smooth and efficient manner. Project managers can do the same by identifying the right approaches -- that is, methods, processes and tools -- and spending time with the team to practice the execution of these approaches. 4. Provide feedback on results. At the end of every game, World Cup coaches spend time with the team as well as the media, sharing their thoughts on the outcome of the game. In addition, they will frequently share key decisions and outcomes that resulted in a win or loss for the team. World Cup coaches do this in a manner that reflects the overall effort of the team as opposed to the efforts of a few key players. Project managers should provide this type of feedback at regular intervals throughout the project, especially during project status meetings. Projects also have the equivalent of media attention in the form of sponsors, so project managers should openly provide the same type of feedback on a regular basis. What behaviors and practices have you seen that might help project managers create winning projects? |
Customer Service Lessons -- From a Hospital?
 Recently, my doctor advised me to go in for a minor surgery, so I had the opportunity to visit a clinical lab and stay at the hospital for three days -- an unlikely place to learn some customer service lessons. Before the surgery, I had to undergo blood tests. There was only one attendant at the blood collection center and a long queue. A woman at the back began complaining about the queue until a nurse came out, took that woman to a room and drew her blood sample. This upset others in line and led to more complaining. The manager came out from his office and asked people to calm down. But after time passed with the queue remaining as long and the manager offering another assurance, people became agitated again. This time, the manager told some people they were unnecessarily raising their voices while he was trying his best. This continued until another staff member (possibly late to his shift) came in. This experience made me think: Do mere assurances work all the time? Don't we need to apologize for unfair treatment and take action to correct the wrongdoing? Perhaps our egos do not allow us to do all this. So what does it take to control our ego? After finally getting my test, I scheduled the surgery. The hospital suggested I come in beforehand to complete the formalities of cost estimation and approval from my insurance (a procedure in India for cashless treatment at a hospital). When I arrived at the hospital's insurance counter, the attendant in charge took me to a room, asked me to fill out a form and told me that a few people are involved in the process, so it might take up to two hours. I filled out the form in a couple of minutes and waited for 30 minutes for a doctor to appear. He asked me a couple of questions, filled out the remaining form and gave it to the attendant. She asked me to wait for another half hour while she conducted some office formalities. Half an hour passed and I became restless. I approached the woman, and she promptly explained, "I said it would take around two hours. Hold on for some more time." After half an hour, she appeared, took my signature on a form and asked me to leave. My experience at the insurance desk taught me a simple lesson. If I don't set expectations (as the attendant did), a customer is free to expect anything based on his or her own experience. For better customer service and satisfaction, it is important to set expectations at the beginning and then exceed those expectations. In my next post, I'll discuss the lessons I learned from my hospital stay, and how those could be applied to project management. What customer service lessons have you learned when you least expected it, and how have you applied them in your projects? |
3 Tips for Remote Control
Categories:
Teams
Categories: Teams
| A relatively new challenge for many project managers is managing remote project teams. As our capacity to work remotely has increased thanks to greater connectivity and skilled employees who aren't restricted by geography, a new challenge has opened up: How do we effectively manage our remote project teams? Here are three ways that I've found success working with mine: 1. Manage based on outputs. Focus on results -- place an emphasis on what must be delivered, not what activities are taking place. If you find yourself doing the latter, begin the shift simply: The next time someone asks what you need him or her to work on, offer an assignment that is based on a deliverable and that is time-sensitive. That's because activities are not the best metric for measuring team members' participation. Plus, if you are measuring for an end goal, you can often find better and more creative solutions to problems because everyone's on the same page in regard to the goal you are pursuing. 2. Set a clear communication plan. When dealing with a remote project team, it's important to set a clear communication plan -- and to stick to it. If not, the void in communications will be filled by baseless speculation and observations that won't be helpful to your team's success. You can begin to set a clear plan by telling team members exactly when you are going to begin communicating with each member and working with your team to make sure the methods you choose are best for communicating with them. Conversely, you should also work together to create a plan that lays out the most effective ways to reach and communicate with you. Doing so ensures open lines of communication and a proper expectation of what positive, productive communications look like despite the distance. 3. Establish a chain of command. When managing from afar, it's tough for project managers to let go of the desire to manage and control every aspect of the project. But you need to accept that this is nearly impossible, because you're likely to have team members in various countries and time zones. You aren't going to be able to effectively manage every aspect of your projects, so setting a chain of command is vital to project success. This chain of command can be in the form of a work flowchart, for example. The important thing is to have a plan that allows the project to continue to move forward, even if you are half a world away. If you've never managed a remote team, becoming comfortable with it takes time and testing. But if you start with these three tips, you will find it much easier to take on some of the other challenging aspects of managing remote teams, such as cultural sensitivity, team building, and disconnecting so that you can refresh yourself mentally and physically. What are your basic tips for managing remote teams? |
Great Time Management Is in the Details
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| Bringing together all the aspects of a project -- including stakeholders, team members, software tools and project requirements -- is just the beginning. Once we gather all the pieces of the project, we cannot sit back and relax. Properly controlling a project hinges on using time management skills to see it through to the end. And those skills consist of these three types of actions: Reactive. There will always be an aspect of the project that needs to be tended to: risks and issues that may need near turnaround resolutions or disparate interests of team members and stakeholders that need addressing. But it's how we've set the stage for our project that will help us steer the project to the finish line, so allot some time to plan for issues to come up. Always be aware of how your surroundings and other resources may affect your project and how they can be of value at another point. For example, when your project is heading into a critical situation and you have no resources that can help, have a contact at the ready who may be able to get an immediate resolution. Co-active. This element entails taking collective action toward correcting an off-schedule project. While we set out to have a process for every action, somewhere along the line, the schedule starts slipping or team members aren't reporting bottlenecks or bad news in a timely fashion. In these instances, reset the tone of your project control. My technique is to keep the scope constantly visible, usually by making sure the agenda has it displayed. However, I didn't do this on a project years ago. The developers were making ongoing enhancements to the software, ones that would be very useful at a future point. Yet they were very off-scope. The co-active measure was to pull back on the enhancements and redefine the scope to get it to what the sponsor originally requested. I did so by meeting with the sponsor and development team manager and reviewing requirements from the standpoint of:
Proactive. But what if a project has components that are not fully defined yet? This is a situation in which we're not reacting to the existing project or controlling project issues, but instead considering the future: possible risks, another project's potential impact or information a stakeholder may want. Here I would recommend actively anticipating what may be helpful that has not yet been discussed. And this consideration can be addressed perhaps as an earned value chart, a report outlining project enhancements for future work or something as simple as organizing a meeting with sponsors to ensure there are no new impacts on the rise. Are there any aspects to managing your time in a project that you see as helping to bring the project to a smooth close? |
Fight or Flight?
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| Most points of difference can be resolved through negotiation, discussion or input from a third party. But other times, circumstances quickly descend into acrimony. Bear in mind when a "fight" breaks out, it's always personal and emotional. If you can remove those two elements, all that remains is a difference or disagreement that can be resolved. Unfortunately, emotions kick in quick and are far more powerful than rational thought. Fight or flight is one of the most basic of survival strategies. As soon as a trigger matching the learned pattern of a perceived threat is sensed, the fight reaction cuts in. Some time later -- a few seconds or a few hours later -- rational thought may override the need to fight, but it always lags the instantaneous emotional reaction. The easiest of the conflicts to manage is where a stereotype is involved. You simply have to distinguish the specific person from the overall stereotype. For example, if a team member has an issue with the project management office (PMO), you can say: "Yes, everyone from the PMO is an interfering bureaucrat focused on wasting time by gathering excessive detail. But Mary from the PMO is different; she's really a 'project manager' and can make your job easy." In this scenario, you simply highlight Mary's positives and distance her from the PMO stereotype. When the fight response is more personal, you should still try to remove the emotion, but your task is much harder. Remember, emotions are instinctive, and factors such as fatigue, stress and emotional events can all shift the balance of power toward the fight instinct. Taking time out to cool down allows rational thinking to seep in, provided the emotions aren't triggered again as soon as the other person returns. This process can be encouraged by diversionary tactics, such as changing the focus or place of discussion, or doing something completely different. It's a good time to go down to the pub... Mediators use a number of tactics to start a rational negotiation. One is to encourage each of the parties to let it all out and vent their anger in a controlled environment. Once a person has done this, it's very difficult to maintain the rage. Another is to hold one-on-one discussions and carry messages back and forth between the parties. This removes the trigger for fighting and allows messages to be heard. If there's any common ground, rational debate can start and, with luck and good management, continue once the parties are face to face. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) advocates keeping disagreements professional and based on rational discussions of information. While this is desirable, we're all people with emotions and sometimes those emotions will take over. A good manager recognizes this and allows time for emotions to settle before using more proactive negotiating tactics to bring rational debate back into play. How do you deal with conflict? |