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Hello Reader, It's almost the end of the year! Have you prepped for your annual review yet, or started thinking about reviews for members of your team? I want to start 2025 strong, with more focus on balance. I have spent Q4 working bizarre hours on one project and I need to shift that around. What about you? It is a good time to be thinking about what you want to get out of 2025, even if you know that your plans and goals are likely to change. Is it training you're after? Is it a promotion? More visibility at work? “Better” projects, whatever that means for you? More balance like me? To help you think through what you could achieve next year (or ditch, because it's just as important to be realistic and factor in some self-care), download my free Career Planner.
This free fillable workbook will help give you clarity on your goals and where you want to go in your career over the coming months. If you'd prefer a bit of accountability time and have me walk you through it, you can watch a recording of the career planning/goal setting drop in webinar where we worked through objectives for the next 3-12 months and looked at what needed to be in place to make those ambitions a reality. And if you really want accountability, I have limited mentoring spots available for January, and my rates for an hour of 1:1 time will be going up to £95 (existing clients will keep their existing rates). Feel free to share the recording and the PDF with your team if you're doing annual reviews and professional development planning for 2025. Have a lovely week! Elizabeth P.S. Don't forget my free session on improving user adoption on software projects is happening on Thursday. Planisware is kindly hosting a discussion, and I'll be sharing the 4 P's of user adoption to help you go beyond the basics of doing some training and comms. |
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, What's the point of a gate review? It's easy to let one blur into just another status meeting on the calendar. A gate review is a control point: a go or no-go decision on whether the project should continue. It's a formal governance step, not a progress update. At a normal status meeting, you're reporting how things are going. At a gate review, the reviewers should be working from agreed criteria and evidence, and actually deciding whether the project carries on, pauses or...
Hello Reader, There are problems you can solve with a framework, a course, or a meeting. And then there are the problems where you have a pretty good idea of the lay of the land, you just need someone to think it through with you. Not because you don't know anything about it, but because you've got too much context and you're too close to it to think clearly. You know what the textbook says. You know what you'd probably advise someone else to do. But when it's your project, your stakeholder,...
Hello Reader, Stuck for ideas? Try this technique for generating a lot of ideas, in a structured way. Lotus Blossom brainstorming works whether you are planning requirements, risk responses, solutions to a problem, and in the video below you can see me work through an example where a team needs to plan out their project communications strategy. A Lotus Blossom template works well for project management because it forces you to expand an idea systematically instead of stopping at the obvious....