Recently I was asked by a journalist how I practiced public speaking.  At this point in my life, getting up in front of an audience is pretty much second nature.  However, it wasn't always so.  I had to work hard at the skill and had to fail A LOT before I found my schtick and was able to get pretty OK at it.   

Here are the highlights from the interview along with six take-aways to help you be a better public speaker.

Patty and I were talking with our son Trevor about some very successful engagements he recently completed: illustrating two books for two different authors. I told Trevor that a major part of my professional focus is to help him be a successful illustrator and graphic artist and to help ensure that AI doesn’t replace him.

Now, quite honestly, I have absolutely no talent when it comes to anything art-related; I can’t draw anything that resembles anything. But, I can help him with his client management skills and profitability, and I can be a voice in the room about AI. When I told him that my primary professional focus was on helping him, he said, “So, what you’re doing is about your legacy, right?”

His observation caught me off guard—in a good way. As I thought about it more, I genuinely want to help Trevor be a successful illustrator and graphic artist. Trevor recognizes my desire to help him, and has told me many times how grateful he is for the help.

He also recognizes that my helping him fulfills something very important to me, which is helping others to help themselves. I not only appreciate his being grateful, I also feel all warm inside about his acknowledgment that I am trying to live my legacy.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com. 

Some time back, I took over a high-risk program from a client project manager. The program had a contractually-fixed due date with a material business impact if the date wasn’t met. There was a minimum-bar scope to which we had to adhere: no subtracting scope or adding to scope.

Budget was not an issue; we (fortunately) didn’t have to worry about how much the program cost. The marching orders were clear: hit the date, manage the scope, and don’t worry about money.

The problem was that there was too much scope to hit the date using conventional waterfall or agile methodologies. We had four months to deliver what in reality was eight schedule months of work. Going back and saying, “It can’t be done” wasn’t an option because of the contractual requirement. So we got creative.

We divided the work into four sprints consisting of one or more baseline meetings, development, integration testing, user acceptance testing, and a go-live meeting with our sponsors at the end of each of the four months.
We not only overlapped the sprints, we also overlapped steps within the sprints. In any given sprint, we had concurrent development and integration testing activities with users participating in integration testing to identify potential user acceptance issues earlier (something I refer to as “canary in the mine” testing).

It was very messy, and not something I would have designed at the outset of a program. But I didn’t have the luxury of designing a “right way to do it” approach. I am confident that if a project auditor did a post-mortem on the approach, I’d get called out as having created and managed a hot mess.

And it was a hot mess—but we got the work done to the minimum-bar scope and the contractually fixed date. Our leadership didn’t give a fig about whether or not we did something the “right” way. We got the job done, hot mess and all.

My purpose for this opening story is not to engage in a waterfall/agile debate. The truth is that we were very hybrid in how we worked. My focus is to talk about something PMs need to avoid in this AI age: long division syndrome. Let me explain.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

When I was in college, I sold clothes in a department store. I was super-ambitious, and was never satisfied with my current position. When I was a salesperson, I wanted to be a department manager. When I was a department manager, I wanted to be an assistant store manager.

In my final semester, I was taking 18 credit hours and had reached assistant store manager, working 40 hours a week. I had taken on way too much but felt I could handle it. I simply wanted those promotions and was unwilling to compromise on work or school. Fortunately for me, the semester ended and I graduated (with my worst semester GPA ever) before completely running myself into the ground. I was protected from myself.

Promotions are a great thing. They’re a recognition of a job well done with rewards including increased responsibility, compensation, and stature. At the same time, they can create significant career roadblocks if not managed intentionally. It’s important to be thoughtful as to the why behind your desire to be promoted. To help this along, this article is about six yellow flags you should consider when pursuing a promotion.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

In the last installment of this series, I reiterated four key pillars a best-in-class product manager drives:

1. Policy – The governing corporate and regulatory rules a business system must align and adhere to
2. People – The skills and knowledge humans need to enable a business system
3. Process – The human activities required both with and without technology to enable a business system
4. Technology – The automation required to enable a business system

The article focused on manual, technology-assisted, and technology-exclusive process components and the role the best-in-class product manager plays in ensuring all components are incorporated into the business system. Next up is the technology pillar.

Of the four pillars, the technology pillar is likely the most familiar to a product manager. A best-in-class product manager can understand the why as articulated by a business owner, translate it into a business system what, and ensure the technological how developed by engineers aligns to the what and satisfies the why.

It’s also important that a product manager has an eagle-eyed view of things that can adversely impact technology development and can proactively mitigate or quickly respond when bad things happen. Having that eagle-eyed view is key to being considered a best-in-class product manager.

To better support the eagle-eyed premise, here are some nuggets to consider:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

As a young manager, I was involved in a significant crisis which had the attention of not only the partners in the firm but also its CEO. I, like many of my cohorts, was nervous about the crisis, its impact on our clients, and my employment status at the firm. There was a very senior partner who was tasked by the CEO to assume responsibility for navigating the firm through the crisis. It took us a year to work our way out of the crisis; and we all learned some valuable nuggets. I thought I was a good leader before the crisis. Now I realize how naïve I was in my assessing my leadership skills. That experience, while excruciatingly painful, was an inflection point in putting me on the path to becoming a better leader.

Some time back, I worked as a project management consultant with a client on some of their large projects. This client had a dedicated change management (CM) organization that recently purchased a methodology from a CM service provider.

All the PMs in the organization were required to go through training on the methodology. The training itself was good in that it helped underscore concepts and level-set on terminology. Included in the methodology was an out-of-the-box project plan that the CM organization wanted the PMs to adopt.

It was very difficult to get the PMs to adopt the methodology because the stock plan didn’t align well with how PMs were used to planning projects. The stock plan tried to include non-CM tasks to be more standalone-like, which made adoption more difficult. The methodology got a bad rap because of the incongruency of the stock plan with how PMs planned out projects. Unfortunate.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

So the older I get the more I think about the lessons I’ve learned in my career. Oh, to go back in time and talk to my younger self about the boneheaded things I did. Sadly, my younger self probably wouldn’t have listened to any imparted wisdom (which I define as knowledge coupled with experience). I was recklessly confident—I didn’t think I would get burned by touching the stove, no matter how many before me got burnt.

Ah, the naivete of youth.

What I’ve come to realize is that learning hard lessons doesn’t mean I have to experience them first-hand. It’s far less physically, emotionally and financially painful to learn from others. This has led me to an important conclusion--there are two paths to wisdom. The first is experiential wisdom, where I know the stove is hot because I touched it. The second is inherited wisdom, where I believe someone with credibility when they tell me the stove is hot. I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress, and money if I understood and practiced inherited wisdom.

In my zeal to help those still climbing the career mountain, following are my 12 wisdom nuggets to help others avoid experiential wisdom and replace it with inherited wisdom.