The Blog / Project Management

Prioritization: Your Key to Sanity

I’m at a key point of my career that I’m sure many of you are intimately familiar: there is too much to do.  Too far behind in one project, too many tasks left undone, and too much going on in my personal life.  A few months ago, I was trying to do it all, and […]

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Don’t Be a Recognition Thief

Catching up on my reader feed, I caught this article on Harvard Business Review about Stopping Theft at Work.  At first I thought we were talking pens and paper, but the article focuses on a much more troubling (and more common) type of work theft: stealing credit from others. Stealing recognition from your co-workers might […]

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Preparing for Change

Sometimes, change takes us by surprise.  We wake up one morning, and boom!  Life is different.  It can be good or bad change, but either way, there’s no way to prepare for it. Sudden change isn’t the only type of change we encounter.  Oftentimes, we see change coming from a mile ahead.  Two weeks left […]

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Two Rules for Small Team Management

Obviously, being one of the founders of Fellowstream, I have a biased opinion of how you should use tools to facilitate good communication on a small team.  Bare in mind, though, that Fellowstream is a labor of love born out of frustration managing several small video game teams throughout my career. An online tool, like […]

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Patience and Project Management

Piggybacking on my last blog post on why project management isn’t fire fighting, today I tackle the idea of patience.  Patience is often said to be a virtue, but unfortunately, this concept doesn’t often translate into our professional lives.  Stakeholders want deadlines moved up two weeks, co-workers want to resolve their problems today, and we […]

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Why Project Management isn’t Fire Fighting

Unless you live in a happy fantasy land (and if you do, please send directions so I can go there too), you’ve worked on a project that has had at least one “fire” emergency.  It could have been that the server went down right after a website launch.  Maybe the catering company didn’t show up […]

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Focusing on the Problem at Hand

So you’ve done all your homework. You’ve got the entire project scoped out, involved all the stakeholders, and assembled a rocking team. Work on your project has already started, and up until now, things were going great. Schedules were hit, team members were jazzed, and your boss was pleased. It seemed like nothing could stand […]

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Actually, the Sky isn’t Falling

Oh, Chicken Little.  When you run around screaming, “The sky is falling!” we nod and chuckle to ourselves at how silly you look.  Because we all secretly know the sky isn’t falling.  That “piece of sky” was just an acorn.  We feel safe and secure in the knowledge that we ourselves would never overact like […]

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Recharging your Batteries

Growing up, I listened to a cassette headphone player so much, that my parents bought rechargable AA batteries to save on costs.  In order to effectively recharge the batteries, you had to play them down until they had nothing left in them.  Then you’d leave them in the charger box overnight and voila!  Freshly charged […]

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Finding the Right Pace

We’ve all been on projects where setting the right work pace is an issue.  The most common problem is finding a pace that will allow you to get your work done on time.  Usually, your work is tied into that of others, so you don’t always get to set your own pace.  Getting the right […]

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