Some time back my son and I participated in a service project to help a young family clean out a back yard.  At one time the yard was a wonderful oasis with a swimming pool, lush garden, and beautiful walkways.  The once beautiful oasis was neglected over time and became an overgrown jungle of northwest foliage with its prime resident being thorny blackberry bushes.  The blackberry bushes were six feet tall and covered most of the yard.  What a prickly mess!

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in working with my clients.  There is an increased focus on companies assembling project teams comprised of cross-organizational team members to solve problems. This is increasingly being done in favor of single organizations trying to produce results on their own.  More and more project teams are taking on "virtual" characteristics where teams are temporarily assembled and could be located anywhere in the country or the world.

When I was a kid in Connecticut I went with my Father to take my sister and her infant son to the train station.  My sister had a lot of bags so my Father helped her carry her things on to the train.  I was standing on the platform waiting for my Father to get off the train so we could go home.  Then all of a sudden the train started moving with my Father still on the train!  Here I am, an 8-year-old boy standing on the train platform all by myself while my Father is on the train heading to Washington DC. I remember seeing the train start to pull away, and my Father waving at me through the window to go to the ticketing office so I can tell them what happened.   This was in the days where there were no cell phones, so my Father couldn't communicate with me to let me know what was happening.  I went into the ticketing office and through sobs told the ticket agent that my Father got stuck on the train and I got left on the platform all by myself.  The ticket agent was very reassuring and told me that everything was going to be OK.  Fortunately the next stop was only about 30 minutes away so I was reunited with my Father in an couple of hours.  It was one of the scariest times of my entire childhood, being left on the train platform all by myself. 

When I was a kid one Christmas I got a Lionel train set from my parents.  It was really cool.  The locomotive had a smoke stack that actually "smoked" when you put a drop of oil into it.  I can still remember the burning oil smell the locomotive would emit as it raced around the tracks.  The transformer which governed the speed of the train went all the way up to "90" (I still believe it was in "miles per hour!") and had three rail cars that were all different colors and a caboose.  The train set also came with enough track to form a figure-8 that I  would push the tracks together using special pins that fit into the ends of the tracks. 

Some time back I spent about three hours writing and doing emails at one of our local malls.  I love this place because there are lots of tables to sit at and the mall has free wireless access so I can be online all the time.  As I was exiting the mall I noticed a woman about 20 feet away from the entrance heading into the mall.  As I walked out the door I held the door open for this woman for a few seconds.  As she walked by me into the mall she said "WOW!"  She was surprised that I actually took three seconds out of my life to hold a door open for a complete stranger.  Imagine what I could have done with those three seconds that I wasted :-). 

Project management is changing….it's becoming more strategic, more mainstream, and not just synonymous with technology implementations. Today's PM needs to be more than technically adept or be able to whip out a gantt chart.  Get a read on some of these crucial skills the everyday PM will need to succeed:

I’m a huge fan of sausages. Whether it be Italian, bratwurst, chorizo, kielbasa, or andouille, I love the seasoning and the snap of the casing when you bite into it. Now I know that the stuff that goes into sausage is of the most undesirable parts of the animal including organs, guts, head, and other parts that I prefer not to think about. I have never had the opportunity to see sausage being made, and as a matter of principle; I don’t want to because I know I’d be grossed out and it would ruin my appetite each time I enjoyed a banger. I choose to remain blissfully ignorant about the sausage making process.

Just about every seasoned project manager has experienced at least one failure in his or her career. I am always skeptical of the experienced PM who says "I've never failed".  They're either lying or don't have experience. Some of my best (and most painful) growth as a professional occurred because of a failed project. Project managers can redeem themselves and maintain credibility by doing the following:

Secrets of success?  Oh puh-leeze.  There aren't any secrets of success in my opinion.   Success is achieved through things that we've been taught to do for years and years.  Good old-fashioned hard work is one of your strongest foundations to ensure meeting your life goals.  In addition, building the following pillars on the foundation of hard work will increase the likelihood that you can meet those goals and achieve your dreams.  Check out these four pillars and see if any resonate with you:

A couple of years ago I did an interview on what a manager can do to regain trust when he or she has screwed up royally.  I thought the points were particularly pertinent to many of my subscribers so I thought I'd print excerpts from the interview here: