In December 2015 our son Trevor, who was diagnosed with autism at age 5, graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Film and Media Studies.  Despite the challenges and all of the change Trevor endured in his college experience, he graduated with a 3.5 GPA with very little assistance.  He also experienced living by himself, living with nice and not-so-nice roommates, internships, and a summer job as a photographer at a boys camp in North Carolina.  He gained a tremendous amount of life experience and learned a ton about himself as a person.  His graduation in December put an exclamation point on a very rich college experience.  But college is only one race in the marathon called life; his next race - employment - was yet to start.  Read more

So okay, Microsoft Project is a super flexible tool in helping you as a project manager define your project tasks, dependencies, and resources.  Quite frankly, though, the workplan you define in MS Project is only as good as the thought that goes into it.  Too often I've seen savvy MS Project users completely bungle a project because, while the tool was being used appropriately, the workplan didn't make sense to the project team and didn't reflect what really needed to be done.  The team consistently expressed confusion about what needed to be done by when because the project workplan wasn't reflective of the actual work which needed to be done.  Great exercise in using MS Project, but poor execution of the project.  Blech.

Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth

Within a few months of my open door policy, I saw my own productivity drop and my frustration level rise because I kept getting interrupted by people taking me up on my open-door policy.  My open-door policy soon turned into a series of random interruptions that caused me to not get my stuff done.  I came to recognize that I needed to be accessible to people but that I could control the accessibility through scheduled time.  Open-door means be accessible, not come in whenever you want.

A pretty nifty feature in Microsoft Project is the ability to define a project through the use of the project guide.  The project guide is a cool little wizard that walks you through setting up a project, assigning resources to the project, tracking progress, and reporting on progress.  What I like about this wizard is not only the help it gives newbie project managers, but also is a great reminder of the cool MS Project capabilities for more seasoned MS Project project managers.  

To get started with this cool project management software tool do the following:

So let's cut to the chase...

You may be a great consultant, one who effectively applies his or her wisdom and experience to help his or her client solve some tough business problem.   That's all fine and well.  When it comes to facilitation, though, it's a different ballgame and a very different approach to problem solving.  I like to think of the difference as follows:

Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth