Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Viewing Posts by Conrado Morlan
Gen Y: Driving Lessons Learned
| Any project manager or team member can appreciate the value of historical data to learn from previous project experiences and reduce associated project risks. But have you considered whether it's available in a format that appeals to Gen Y team members? The traditional way of capturing lessons learned is by using a template to record the lesson and saving it in a repository. But given their collaborative nature, Gen Y team members may perceive this as a limited source of information, based on the experience of a single individual. Instead, many Gen Y team members are pushing for a more collaborative approach, in which all project documents can be classified under categories, linked to wikis, referenced in blogs and be shared via micro-blogging or clouds. The goal is to prevent having valuable project documents stuck in one person's hard drive. This new approach stands in contrast to the traditional view of knowledge as a finite asset, living and managed inside the organization's boundaries. With a more collaborative approach, it doesn't matter if the author of the lesson learned left the company, because the organization still "keeps" that employee's knowledge when she or he is gone. One happy medium is to limit the collaboration environment to the employees in the organization and restricted to the project team until the project is completed. The adoption of this new way of managing organizational process assets will require the endorsement of senior management. You will also need to implement a strategy that's attractive to all team members for full adoption of a new collaboration approach to lessons learned. To do so, introduce a collaborative approach that best suits your project environment. Perhaps task the Gen Y team members to present this new method and highlight its benefits to the project during a team meeting. Finally, remember that individuals take time to accept new practices, so have patience. How easy or difficult would it be for you to embrace a collaboration approach for lessons learned? What are the benefits for your team and your organization? |
Real Results From a Dinner Joke
| Who said managing projects would be a bed of roses? You have probably experienced the same hardships I have on a few projects, especially if you manage multicultural distributed teams. Well, the global project I was leading was no exception. We had hit some bumps in the road, but finally found ourselves in an in-person project status meeting in a major city in the United States where the organization was headquartered. Brought together were distributed team members from the United States, Latin America and Germany. In the meeting, we all agreed we were in the same boat, but there were still many disagreements and moments of finger pointing. By the end of the day, with no positive outcome in sight, we were tired, frustrated and hungry. The last thing we wanted to do was to see each other that evening, but we still decided to have dinner together for lack of other plans. A large circular table held our party of 10. While we read the menus, the server asked us what we would like to drink, and that's when the magic started. The server said: "I hear different accents. Are you pilots?" To which I responded no, and then jokingly added: "We are Facebook friends from different parts of the world and decided to pick a place to have dinner and meet in person." My colleagues heard the joke and followed along. Then, the server asked us where we came from and about our interests. She became our group moderator. Every time she came to the table, she asked questions, which we answered according to our different cultures and life experiences. We realized we shared many things in common -- and little by little, we became acquaintances on a personal level. This dinner that almost everyone was trying to avoid helped us connect. The next day at the office, even though we were facing the same project hardships, our attitudes had changed. We worked together to define an action plan to bring the project back on track. We also agreed to stay on site for the next two weeks to implement the plan. And during our free time, we kept bonding by participating in shared interests. For example, those who were runners ran together in the morning, while others who were auto-racing fans visited a go-kart track near our hotel. At night, the wine lovers taught us about vintages over dinner. How do you foster bonds with distributed multicultural teams? What team-building exercise has yielded good results? Share your thoughts below along with your Twitter handle, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
Culture Shocked Into Action
| During my project management career, I have experienced many culture shocks. But the one that changed my life happened when I joined a global corporation in Mexico in the mid-1980s. I was a recent graduate and had just finished my internship with this organization when I got a job offer. During immersion training, all the new hires visited the boardroom, lined with awards and honors that the Mexican branch had won in the past. Most impressive was the mahogany table, where many major deals went down. It was cared for like a museum piece. After several months, I adjusted to the corporate world with the help of a great manager and mentor. Soon enough, prep work started for the quarterly review meeting, when executives visited our office from the company's U.S. headquarters. To my surprise, my manager included me in the prep team, which meant I would be a presenter. When the big day came, I arrived at the boardroom a few minutes beforehand to ensure everything was in order for my first presentation to senior executives. There, I found one of the visiting top executives -- with both feet up on the mahogany table. When the meeting began, we commenced introductions. The visiting executives threw their business cards across the table as a casino croupier would, while my Mexican colleagues and I handed our business cards to them. The meeting progressed, and when the time came for one of the visiting executives to present, he tossed a copy of a handout not only to me, but also to the general manager of the Mexican branch. I was in total shock. I wondered, how could this be happening? They were high-level executives, and their lack of good manners -- by my standards -- took me by surprise. I also felt frustrated. This was not interaction I had hoped for with headquarter executives. It took me some time to digest the experience. But by the next quarterly review, I was ready to take action. I tossed my business card at each of the U.S. executives during the introductions. Before my presentation, I slid handouts across the table at them but handed them to my Mexican colleagues. My actions raised a few eyebrows among the latter. By the end of the meeting, the executive I saw with his feet up on the table months prior asked me to stay in the room. I expected to be reprimanded, or even fired. But he said: "Thanks, Conrado. Your actions during the meeting made me realize that business behaviors need to be adjusted according to location. What may be okay in my country may not be okay in yours. You taught me a great lesson. Employees like you make this a great company." That was the "wow" moment that had an impact on the rest of my professional life. I'm not recommending such drastic actions, but I felt strongly enough about my experience to take the risk. The moral of my story: Culture shock does not have to be a negative or incapacitating. I used my experience as a source of motivation, introspection and change. It led me to a lifetime of researching organizational and national cultures and sharing my experiences of working with multicultural and multigenerational teams. As a project manager, how have you recovered from culture shock and turned it an opportunity for professional growth? Share your thoughts below along with your Twitter handle, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
10 Commandments of Email Communications
| To yield expected results, a distributed project team must first speak the same language when it comes to communications. With that in mind, I developed a basic set of email communications rules called the Project Communication Decalogue. I require everyone on my team to adhere to it when emailing each other, and I introduce it the first time I meet with a new team or member. When everyone is on the same page, it makes for leaner, cleaner communications.
From experience, the adoption of these rules takes a few weeks. But once you get buy-in from all team members, email communications become a smoother process, freeing up time to focus on much more important project tasks. What are your basic email communication rules? How do you get your project team to speak the same language via email? |
Fostering Cultural Awareness — Right from the Start
| Establishing a connection early on among team members is essential, but it can get complicated when they're from different parts of the world. One of the elements I consider is what anthropologist Edward T. Hall describes as a person's cultural context level. Higher context cultures -- such as Italian, Latin American, Chinese and Indian -- place great value on interpersonal relationships. Lower context cultures -- such as U.S., British or German -- emphasize directness and logic. For example, non-verbal communication is more important in higher context cultures. In higher context cultures, the contract is a starting point for negotiation. In lower context cultures, the contract is the contract. By understanding an individual's personal, national and organizational cultures, you can better align the team and gain greater influence. I didn't just read up on this theory. I lived it. While leading a project in Brazil in 2001, some U.S. team members told me they were uncomfortable with how Latin American team members greeted them with hearty handshakes and kisses on the cheek. I knew I had to address the issue early on to set the tone for the rest of the project. So during our next meeting, I eased into the topic by showing clips of people greeting each other in movies or sitcoms, making sure none were from the United States or Latin America. Afterward, I asked team members how they would react if they were in a similar situation. This was a revealing moment as the team became aware of their cultural differences by "seeing" themselves in the video clips. This broke the ice and opened the floor for candid discussions. Since then, I've included cultural differences on the agenda for every first team meeting. I use that time as an open forum for us to share and record cultural experiences. I also create a repository with documents and video clips that can be later used to induct new team members. I've shared this experience with peers, who agree that cultural awareness is a skill that should be developed and mastered. Incorporating a cultural differences exercise establishes respect and empathy for diverse values and behaviors, which in turn creates an open and accepting team environment. How do you handle cultural differences of your team members at the start of each project? What are you doing to build cultural awareness? |