If your organization is experiencing disproportionally higher chaos on your larger projects, you might ask if you had sufficient information and time at the beginning to understand the problem being solved before anyone committed to cost or schedule targets.

I’ve seen a lot of change during my 45-year career in information technology, some more significant than others.

If the people assigned to give you guidance are AWOL, how might you proceed?

When should the team and stakeholders be brought together to assure everyone is on the same page?

An IT manager's "chess" metaphor contrasts HR's "checker" mindset: HR seeks homogenous staff, but IT needs diverse specialists. This mismatch creates challenges in hiring, promoting, and compensating IT professionals, often leading to talent loss.

What are the attributes of an effective team?  Can you build or grow one?  What would success look like?

This is an article about three ideas: project sponsorship, project wagers, and risk.  Understanding their relationship is critical to becoming more effective as project managers, and organizational leaders.

In games like Everquest, World of Warcraft, or Diablo there are significant milestones when you accumulate enough experience to “go up a level”.  It’s always rewarding to watch a project manager do that in real life.

At the beginning of our careers, we know a little bit of theory and have a little bit of practice but worry that the “adults” around us are going to embarrass us when they realize we don’t know everything about everything.

Project managers need to ensure that sponsors, team members, and stakeholders understand that un-managed change is the real bogeyman.

Projects should have clearly defined goals, schedule targets, and resource allocations. When projects are described as “ongoing” that is often a red flag suggesting that either this isn’t a project, or it is not being well-managed.

No one likes process for process’s sake.  Most of us are naturally resistant to change.  Modifying standards or processes is an organizational change task.  How do we encourage people to embrace change?

Many people resist writing and are out of practice, but small improvements can make a big difference.  If you would rather go to the dentist than write a one-page report, these tips are for you.

Make sure that your change management process is clearly outlined at the beginning of a project and use it when there are unforced errors to get concessions from a vendor when the fault is clearly on their side.

Because of vendor firm expertise at blame management, clients need to be vigilant and proactive about managing systems integration efforts.

If you are aware of your vendor’s motivations it helps you understand their behavior and can be a real asset when you negotiate with them.

When a project manager is confused, sometimes the problem is the situation and not the PM.

Life lessons can be found everywhere if you look for them.

When organizations want to step up their project management game and implement more rigorous project management practices, there is always fear that the administrative overhead will exceed the value gained.

A project’s sponsors are the senior managers who want the project completed and control the project’s budget and schedule. Effective sponsors support the project manager to get the job done.

Being responsive to customer needs and desires is not a bad thing—the decision to accept, reject, or defer a change is something that should be considered in light of the consequences of the delay.

Projects exceed their predicted schedules for many reasons. The cost consequences of some delays are obvious, but some are subtle. Knowing the expected costs of delays is vital to supporting informed decision-making.

We often talk about the importance of effective communication on a project, but we often omit timing and context. Messages need to be timely if a project manager is going to guide the narrative.

Some tolerate multi-tasking better than others. Beyond tolerance and even the ability of some people to switch contexts more efficiently than others is an effect of multi-tasking that most of us have experienced but rarely discuss.

An important component of any User Acceptance Testing (UAT) plan are the entry criteria. No complex data system will ever be perfect, but starting with lax entrance criteria puts the UAT team in a weak position.

Some issues/hills are important and worth going all in – but most probably aren’t. Project managers must choose their battles wisely and develop scope discipline.

The longer maintenance is deferred—which is easy to do in the short term—the more expensive it becomes and the more difficult it can be to schedule.

Ask people to describe the number one job of a project manager and few will get it right. Payson Hall discusses the most important part of project manager's role.

A plea to software product owners to avoid adding buggy features or making capricious changes to your GUI. Quality matters, remember?

 As I start my fifth decade working on projects, primarily in the IT and software development space, I wanted to share some patterns I have observed that suggest a project is in trouble, Jeff Foxworthy style.

If you’ve never managed an IT project for your organization that had significant work outsourced to a vendor, what’s learned on the job can be VERY painful and VERY expensive. Here are some things to watch out for.

Absent an effective requirements baseline it is difficult to distinguish clarifications and error correction from enhancements and changes to the original ask.

It is difficult to succeed without effective sponsorship—and almost impossible if your sponsor is toxic, as this true tale explains.

Building schedules for complex projects is challenging. While the results are never perfect, credible schedules are a useful communication and coordination device. Incredible schedules are a dangerous waste of time and energy that damage a project manager’s credibility and cost an enterprise a fortune.