I help project professionals get more done with less stress. Having been a project manager for over 20 years, I share tried-and-tested tips that work in the real world, every Tuesday. Join our community of over 15,000 project professionals (and accidental project managers too!).
AI takeaways from Project Forum
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Hello Reader, At Project Forum last Tuesday, I attended a talk by James Garner and Yoshi Soornack on AI, because… well, FOMO really. The talk about AI is all over the place and staying up to date is tricky (some stats here about how it's actually being used). Two easy key takeaways for me were: Use AI as a thought partner, in much the same way as you chat about ideas to colleagues, but you can’t offload all cognition. Prescriptive analytics is the next step after predictive analytics – AI can give us ideas about what to do with the data, but it needs a human to scrutinise the plan. Two more tricky takeaways were: Use AI to accelerate creating documents. (Why? The point of a project document is not to have the document, but to have the conversations that lead to agreement and understanding and these are put in the document as a record. If the language you’re working in isn’t your first language, by all means use AI to edit and tidy up your output, but goal is the content of the document, not the actual document itself.) AI can help productivity. (Why is productivity always the end goal? When do we stop wanting more? Yes, at a country-wide level we have to address the aging workforce and skills shortage and the need to support citizens in their old age with potentially a smaller population. Productivity is often interpreted as doing things faster, but shouldn’t we also be asking if we should be doing the thing at all?) One of the great things about being with other project professionals for the day is that I came away with a sense of feeling not alone. I ran two roundtable conversations and talked to people who had the same challenges as me. We shared ideas and I think we left those conversations with a few lightbulb moments. That’s the kind of conversation we also have inside Project Management Rebels, our professional community that meets online monthly. If you were thinking about joining, now’s a great time! Let me know if you have any questions. Have a lovely week! Elizabeth Talking of documentation...
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Calling all Rebel Project Managers!
I help project professionals get more done with less stress. Having been a project manager for over 20 years, I share tried-and-tested tips that work in the real world, every Tuesday. Join our community of over 15,000 project professionals (and accidental project managers too!).
Hello Reader, One of the things nobody really prepares you for in project management is how isolating it can be, not in a dramatic way, just in the ordinary day-to-day sense of having problems you can't fully articulate to your team, questions you can't ask your stakeholders, and situations where the textbook answer is technically correct but completely useless in the actual context you're dealing with. Most project managers don't have a peer group. You might have colleagues, but they're busy...
Hello Reader, Most project managers don’t actually manage “their” team. We manage people who report to someone else. Welcome to matrix life! If you’ve ever tried to: Negotiate resource availability Handle conflicting priorities Run a meeting that doesn’t derail Get alignment without formal authority …you know the plan is only half the job. Most of what I seem to spend my days doing is negotiating, trying to get the right people to show up, slotting my work around other people's priorities...
Hello Reader, I've been asked more than once by project managers who are quietly worried about it: what do you do when your RAG status doesn’t tell the full story? The traffic light is green. Technically everything is on track. And yet you have this nagging feeling that something’s not quite right, a dependency that’s wobbling, a sponsor who’s gone quiet, a team that’s delivering but only just, and they're not as proactive as they used to be. RAG is a simple tool for a complicated job, and...