For the past year, I have been coaching a high-potential leader. Over the past few months, we have been talking about the concept of a pro forma resume. This is a resume you would like to have in the future, which allows you to chart your career movement and experiences to make the pro forma resume a reality.

In this leader’s case, we have been talking about what he wants his resume to look like in 10 years. His pro forma has given him a north star to strive for in his career and is providing a roadmap to help him get there. In a recent meeting, he brought up a benefit of the pro forma that I hadn’t considered, but one that makes perfect sense.
He is currently leading a particularly complex project involving both employees and volunteers, and has exposure at the very highest levels of the organization. The work is particularly stressful, and he is facing a number of new challenges.

In our meeting, he was feeling a bit overwhelmed and stressed due to the project and its issues. As we talked about the project, he made an interesting observation. “You know,” he said, “there are a lot of tough things I’m working through, but knowing I can include some of these things on my resume is really going to enhance my marketability.”

His comment caught me off guard, not because it was in any way wrong (in fact it was a brilliant observation), but because I had never articulated like he did the link between navigating thorny issues and how they enhance a resume. He later told me that the idea of having a more robust resume as result of the project and its challenges energizes him to address the issues head on.

Now that’s a “making lemonade out of lemons” perspective.

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One of my favorite movies is A Few Good Men. The riveting court scene at the end of the movie where Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise) is questioning Col. Nathan R. Jessep (played by Jack Nicholson) ranks right up there with some of my favorite movie scenes. “You can’t handle the truth!” and “Did you order the code red?” are lines that could be said in just about any venue or context, and someone will likely tie the line to the movie.

In another scene, Jessep is explaining to Kaffee that, “We follow orders or people die, it’s that simple. Are we clear?” Jessep then underscores, “Are we clear?” to which Kaffee responds, “Crystal.” The scene intensifies in its back-and-forth dialogue until Jessep…actually I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie.

The ”Are we clear”? line has stuck with me over the years. Aside from it being powerful theatrics, it’s something that I believe is a foundational tenet of what we as PMs are all about.

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Some time back I was responsible for a portfolio of projects being done within the finance organization of my company.  One of the projects was outsourced to a large consulting firm who supplied the project management, analysis, and development resources to the project.  I would hold weekly meetings with the project manager who consistently gave me a "thumbs up" on the project up to the first key milestone being hit.  When the week of the first milestone approached, he announced that the milestone was going to have to slip by a week to ensure successful delivery.  The next week came along and again the project slipped a week.  This went on for two more weeks with the promise of "we'll for sure nail it next week."  I decided to do some crawling around the project to assess where the project was really at.  Turns out we were at least a month away from delivering to the milestone which was already a month late.

In Part 1 of Driving Decisions, I talked about my experience as president of our homeowners association and the parallels between being president and being a PM when it comes to driving decisions. I introduced the first five factors to driving decisions:

1. Be clear on what “done” looks like.
   
2. Be specific on who owns driving the decision.
3. Decide who needs to be involved in the decision versus who needs to be consulted or informed.
4. Set the guiding principles.
5. Establish whether you need a best or least-worst alternative.

What follows are the remaining factors to round out the 12:

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I recently had an epiphany about what four decades of leadership and project management experience has finally prepared me to do: I am now the president of our homeowners association.

A bit on our HOA its board of directors: The board is comprised of seven homeowners who are elected to a three-year term. Four are officers (president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer), and three are directors. I have served on the board in years past as the treasurer, but this is my first tour of duty as president.

We represent 24 homeowners, mostly in the 50+ age range. Many of the homeowners have winter homes elsewhere to escape the rainy months in the Pacific Northwest. It's a beautiful community, and by and large everyone gets along just fine. But there certainly are some disagreements—not only among homeowners, but between homeowners and the board; among the board; and between the board and external entities such as the city government.

The disagreements can range from a homeowner objecting to a neighbor smoking tobacco (or other substance) on their balcony and a homeowner not complying with our rules and regulations, to major issues with the city or significant third-party providers like our fire alarm monitoring company.

Most all of the disagreements land on the steps of the board, which is accountable for driving resolution. I liken some of the issues to working in a hospital emergency room; you never quite know when the next injury is going to be wheeled in.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

The waterfall purists typically crave structure, with a clear understanding of scope, schedule and budget before commitment and adherence to scope, schedule and budget through delivery.

The agile purists typically crave nimbleness, with rolling waves of smaller logical work groupings and more frequent delivery. I’ve seen discussions on the topic devolve into shouting matches as to which methodology is the “right” one.

In my experience, project managers generally prefer waterfall while engineers prefer agile. PMI has developed the Disciplined Agile® framework, which sandwiches three hybrid levels between the waterfall and agile anchors.

While I think some of my agile purist friends might take exception to the Disciplined Agile® name (as if agile is an undisciplined framework), the way of working spectrum is a reasonable split-the-wickets acknowledgement that there can be peaceful coexistence between agile and waterfall.

Now I’ve been doing this stuff for four decades, and have seen projects from just about every vantage point performing just about every role in my career. I am actually a fan of a hybrid methodology and have successfully blended components of agile and waterfall in delivering very high-visibility initiatives.

In doing so, I’ve learned and implemented some tips that have helped me drive hybrid initiatives, as follows:

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In Part 1 of The 4 Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence (EI), I focus on knowing thyself. A key aspect of knowing thyself is developing an action plan based on improvement opportunities identified from a 360-feedback evaluation. The nuggets you get from a 360 are crucial in helping you become a better-rounded PM.

There is another great source to help you in your learning journey: your stakeholder’s values. Before we get in too deep, here is a level-set of who I include in the stakeholder universe:

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I worked for three companies in my professional career: Accenture, Microsoft, and my own company, Consetta Group.

In my 11 years at Accenture, I worked on gigs in the oil & gas, food distribution, technology, retail distribution, aerospace & defense, software product management, and outsourcing industries. At Microsoft I worked in IT, corporate procurement, corporate planning, and HR over a nine-year span. I not only got a rich education in different industries and functions, but was able to go deeper in areas I liked.

And it all largely happened despite my lack of planning.

Particularly in my career at Accenture, I mostly took the gigs that were given to me. I really had no idea what skills I wanted to build or industries I wanted to work in. What my experience at Accenture imprinted on me was to stay in a job for about 18 months then look for my next opportunity.

This continued at Microsoft as well as my own consultancy. After about 18 months I would get bored and need a change. Even to this day, I occasionally get an itch to do something different and new.

I’ve looked at a lot of LinkedIn profiles over the past several years. My first inclination is to go to the experience section and see not just where people have worked, but how many companies and how long they worked at each company. This review provides first impressions for me:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.