Whether you're a project manager, project administrator or a departmental manager, success is not about checking boxes.

If you do it that way, both your stakeholders and your team can feel that the project management process is something that is done to them rather than something that’s done for them. It gives them no additional value but all of the additional pain.

While checking boxes appears to be the most efficient way of getting through all of the work that you have as a manager, it's not effective... and if it's not effective then it doesn't matter how efficient you are, it's all wasted effort.

Remember what you're there to accomplish as the project manager or, any manager for that matter. One of the first roles of a manager is as a leader. That means leading change effectively.  In order to do that, you need to understand is what success for the project and for the organization actually looks like.

On time and on budget are very...

The planned post I had for this week has changed. This week I’m sharing one of my mistakes. 

Everyone makes mistakes on their journey, myself included. I’ll share the big one with you in the hopes that you learn something from my errors.

For those of you who have read my book, you know I’m focused on the concept of Business (or Organizational) Value. If you start a project, job, program where you’re going to spend time and money, and haven’t mapped it back to Business Value, then you’ve started down the wrong path. You may achieve value, but that will be accidental.

There are two paths to Business Value:

• You can develop a (new or improved) product or service that allows your external* customer to do something of value to them that they were unable to do before
• You can reduce the internal cost of delivering a product or service to a customer with no loss of value to them

* We’ll come back to who your external customers are and why...