While searching for a job online, Manesh found a listing that caught his eye. “Wow, this looks perfect!” he thought as he read through the position requirements. Then those three dreaded words reared their ugly head:

“Leadership experience required.”

“Dang,” Manesh thought as he closed his laptop. “This is so frustrating. How do I get experience when everyone is expecting me to already have the experience?”

You’ve likely experienced this earlier in your career, or may be going through it now: Potential employers want leadership experience that you don’t have, and you don’t have a clear path on how to get that experience.

When looking to grow leadership skills, this can be a frustrating dilemma. How do you get the experience you need and build great leadership skills when your paths are limited? Here's a potential path...

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

As project managers, we’ve likely been faced with getting a one-line explanation of what a sponsor needs—along with a deadline. Depending on the organization, there could be a range of responses—from doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, getting people in a room to estimate the work, or using a comparative initiative to assess feasibility.

Now, I’m not here to criticize your organization’s approach, but I have found that having something that enables the PM to rough-cut an initiative using some standards can be helpful in providing a lens on whether a date is even remotely achievable. This is where the work-back timebox model comes in.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Dean, a project manager, was conducting a project post-mortem with Tania, his VP.
“Why the month slip, Dean?” Tania asked.
“Well,” Dean started, “we didn’t get on the vendor’s calendar early enough for integration testing. They couldn’t schedule us in when they needed us, so we had to slip.”
Tania shook her head. “Hold on, Dean. The vendor is Conset, right?”
“That’s right.”
“If I remember correctly, we did a project with them last year and the same thing happened; we didn’t get on their calendar early enough and it caused a slip. Were you aware of that?”
“I wasn’t.”
“I specifically asked the project team to include that in the lessons learned. If I recall, Tarun was the PM. Did you talk with Tarun or look at his lessons learned?”
Dean looked down. “Um, no.”
Tania kept her gaze. “Honestly, what good are lessons learned if we don’t bother to use them? This was clearly avoidable.”
“I’ll make sure to document this for the next time, Tania,” Dean said.
“Do you look at lessons learned from other projects?” Tania asked.
“Well, not really, they’re all over the place and in different formats. It’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Unbelievable. We’re willing to make the same mistake over and over and not bother to learn from past mistakes. What a waste.”

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Excerpted from Six-Word Lessons to Avoid Project Disaster

As a young hot-shot information technology (IT) project manager I was convinced that I had it all together. I was bound and determined to show all those more senior to me how to deliver successful projects. It wasn’t until I messed up not one, not two, but three projects simultaneously that I grew up and recognized I wasn’t all that I thought I was. While that period in my professional career was particularly painful, it was also some of the best learnings I could have gone through. Since then I’ve had successes and failures, but the failures became less frequent because I learned to get comfortable with others providing a critical eye on my work and helping with the necessary precision questioning to keep me out of hot water. This is the genesis behind Six-Word Lessons to Avoid Project Disaster.

​“I’m in!” Lori, the department general manager said to Caleb.

Caleb had just joined Lori’s department from a competitor where he had worked for two years after college. This was his first one-on-one meeting with Lori. Lori had a strong reputation as a people cultivator and looked for opportunities to grow her staff with in-the-moment learning opportunities. She was about to get that opportunity with Caleb.

“Great to hear. I can get going on the plan right away,” Caleb said.

“That’s great, now what do you need from me?”

Caleb stopped. “Um, I’m sorry?”

“What do you need from me?”

“Uh, nothing.”

“Nothing? Do you have the support you need from my management team?”

“Well, I was going to talk with them about it.”

Seeing the teachable moment opportunity, Lori decided to help Caleb think things through.

One of my column readers recently sent in this question: One of our senior project managers left abruptly in the middle of a 3 year million $ contract. What experience and education would you consider in promoting a replacement? 

Ooh, good meaty problem.  Not so simple a solution.

A sad tale of a how a sponsor/PM relationship killed a project...

Exec identifies a need for a project and nominates self as sponsor.  PM gets assigned to project and assembles project team.  Sponsor is vague about problem to be solved other than "we need a new system".  PM can't communicate problem to be solved to the team because he doesn't understand what the problem is.  Sponsor continues to ask for more and more things to be included in project, PM doesn't have courage to say no.  PM treats sponsor as "that person in the corner office" and doesn't know how to ask for help, so he escalates everything.  Sponsor has to make some tough decisions but is unwilling to do so because of the political fallout.  PM provides bad information about decision alternatives so sponsor ignores him.  Due to changing priorities project no longer makes sense to do, but PM lobbies to keep the project going.  Sponsor loses interest because there are bigger fish to fry.  PM and team are disillusioned because sponsor doesn't care.  Project dies a slow death.  R.I.P.

While this is a fictional story, you can undoubtedly relate to most of these things happening on one project or another in your career.  The sponsor/PM partnership on a project is one of those "soft skill" factors that gets frequently overlooked when assessing a PM's skills but is a key determinant in the success or failure of a project.  Under a healthy partnership, the sponsor and PM work as a singular unit to ensure the project gets what it needs to be as successful as possible using only as many resources as absolutely necessary to secure success.  Under a less than healthy relationship the project will undoubtedly cost more in time and money assuming it even gets completed at all. 

Throughout my career I've been both a sponsor and a PM and have first-hand experience in how this relationship needs to work from both sides of the desk. Through my experience, I've locked down on ten truths which I feel are crucial to securing a healthy sponsor/PM partnership.  See if these resonate with you:

On the 1980s HBO show Not Necessarily the News, comedian Rich Hall created Sniglets, which dictionary.com defines as “any word coined for something that has no specific name. Words like Jokesult (When someone insults you, you call them on it, and they say, "It was just a joke.”) and Chwads (discarded gum found beneath tables and countertops) were born to humorously explain commonplace things or actions. I’ve created 20 of my own project management and leadership sniglets; some made up words, others repurposed words or phrases. I hope they resonate with you and put a bit of humor in your day.

Some time back I was in a meeting with a project manager who presented the status on his troubled project to the project sponsor and other executive stakeholders. This project was of high interest to the sponsor and stakeholders as they were depending on its successful completion to make some major changes in their respective organizations. The project sponsor asked the project manager a very straightforward question:

Why is the project slipping?

The project manager went into a long, meandering monologue. The sponsor interrupted and asked the question again. More meandering from the project manager. Seeing the sponsor and other stakeholders’ growing frustration, the project manager’s boss stepped in and said they needed to do more homework and would come back the next day better prepared. The next day, the project manager’s boss presented the status and answered questions--along with a new project manager.