PMBoK7 Perspectives: Apply Expertise

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Photo by Jose Aljovin from Unsplash

Today, we’ll explore how project managers contribute benefits with their expertise, one of the new elements of project delivery in the Project Management Institute’s seventh version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) Here are a few significant ways to apply your expertise in managing projects:

  • Complete project tasks. Most project managers have technical and industry expertise relevant to their projects. Completing technical tasks can be an appropriate and helpful contribution to the projects we manage (although it isn’t the project managers primary role.) But you shouldn’t take opportunities away from other team members, which they might perceive as restricting their growth.  
  • Coach your team members. The best project managers increase the capabilities of their team members who work on their projects. They provide technical guidance without dictating how to complete tasks. They also help others understand the practice of project management, so they can contribute to building work breakdown structures, verifying estimates, and confirming schedules. Because projects often have wide-ranging business implications, they coach people on business elements as well, such as communication, presentation skills, and managing risk.
  • Improve the practice of project management. Project managers are known for getting things done. They bring confidence to their management team that envisioned changes will come to fruition via the application of sound project management tools and perspectives. Applying your project management expertise can help improve your organization’s project management practices. Spreading the word about project management practices is an effective way to support your business. Guiding managers as they work with you to deliver projects is another impactful way to apply expertise and increase your business’ project delivery capability.
  • Provide perspectives for management. Respected project managers can help management understand which approaches to facilitating organizational change will be supported by line managers and which ones won’t be! Project work provides project managers with a view to how operational management handles the pressures of increased workload created by supporting projects. Project managers know who responds well, who doesn’t, and which competing workloads might interfere with project progress.

Have you contributed your expertise to your projects in other ways? If so, tell us about it in the comments section.

For more about project management, check out the Become a Project Manager learning path.

PMBOK7 New Perspectives: Caring Steward

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In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll look at the project management standard of being a caring steward, one of the new elements of project delivery discussed in the Project Management Institute’s latest version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) In PMBoK7, Knowledge Areas are replaced with Performance Domains, which recommend additional activities in several areas, including adding project value. Let’s look at ways in which you can be a caring steward while managing your projects. 

Acting with care. A caring steward behaves as if they own the business and all the outcomes the business produces. In a project management context, a caring steward goes beyond managing the schedule and ensuring success criteria are met. It means treating project stakeholders with respect, managing all impacts on the physical environment (such as deploying conservation measures), and ensuring proper disposal of used assets like old computers. A big part of acting with care is engaging in organizational change management to ensure people understand what their role is as project deliverables are released. That way, they are put at ease as the processes they use in their work are enhanced.

Financial control. Financial stewardship is a fundamental responsibility for a project manager. This stewardship goes beyond ensuring project costs are within plan. It includes analyzing how to best use finances to support business goals. For example, it may mean spending more in the short run to save money in the longer term. An example of this is when a vendor announces special pricing for a volume purchase. While purchasing in volume might not have been in the project plan, a good financial steward will examine the advantages and disadvantages of making this volume purchase. Good stewardship also means assessing upcoming planned spending to make sure it’s still reasonable and in the best interest of the business, and constantly reviewing risk mitigation and contingency dollars to determine whether they should be adjusted up or down.

Appropriately exercising authority. Project charters identify the level of authority given to project managers. Caring stewardship involves applying that authority appropriately, such as not using coercion to get things done, not overstating one’s authority, or not exaggerating the project impact to influence others to perform work. The caring steward leads the project with compassion for the business, considers the project’s goals in relation to other initiatives, and acts with compassion while working with stakeholders.

Maintaining compliance. Business rules, project management methodologies and legal considerations should always be front of mind while project managers perform their duties. The caring steward understands the purpose and steps involved to be compliant and adheres to the compliance guidelines when making decisions – when it makes sense. However, caring stewardship doesn’t mean blindly executing processes. It is understanding the intent of those processes and proposing alternative actions when the processes won’t yield the intended results. For example, a standard deliverable in a project management methodology might not make sense for a given project. Rather than waste time producing a stripped-down version of that deliverable, the caring steward will work with management to forgo that deliverable for the project and seek to improve the project methodology to consider alternatives when the deliverable doesn’t make sense.

Have you come across other examples of being a caring steward? If so, join the conversation in the comments section.

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

I’m working industriously on updating the course Microsoft Project 2021 and Project Online Desktop Client Essential Training. With this update, I include additional homework for most movies so you can practice after following along during the video.

PMBoK7 Perspectives: Contribute Insights

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In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll explore the benefits of your project team contributing insights to your project, one of the new elements of project delivery in the Project Management Institute’s seventh version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) Here are a few substantial ways to maximize project delivery by leveraging stakeholder insights.

  • Leverage team member experience. Even the most experienced project managers can learn more to help their projects succeed. Project leadership requires a lot of listening and learning. Team members have experience that helps them build a solid work breakdown structure, identify risks and determine risk responses, manage issues, and test products. Technical team members can also help avoid over-complicating project solutions. Tapping team experience helps maximize success and increase team buy-in!
  • Team up with key business stakeholders. Business team members provide insights to improve outcomes and enhance project delivery. They can also help avoid pitfalls and identify change management approaches to smooth transitions during project deliverable deployment. Engaged business representatives identify hot buttons that may negatively affect the opinions of influential stakeholders, so you can address those issues and protect the success of your project delivery. These critical insights surface you create a team atmosphere, where business and technical experience are valued. The best decisions are based on a broad set of shared experiences.
  • Capitalize on change agents. Change agents can improve your chances for success. Great project managers seek out change agents and involve them in project planning and delivery. The trick is finding the best change agent candidates, because they aren’t always the managers or team leaders that appear on the organization chart. How do you identify these change agents? Listen and watch carefully when requirements are collected. Who speaks up? Who do others look to for agreement? Identify the authors of substantial documents that have been provided. Find these promising change agents and invite them to coffee to do some change agent recruiting!
  • Collect project experiences. People who have participated in past projects can provide a wealth of valuable insights. They can provide the actual level of risk the organization accepts, which key stakeholders are short-term money focused, who will insist on including certain tasks or verification in your project planning, and who is likely to come up with new requirements after the project begins. These bits of critical information save time and frustration! Take time to pick project veterans’ brains. You’ll be happy you did!

Have success stories and anecdotes related to obtaining insights from team members? Share them in the comment section!

For more about working with your project team, check out Daniel Station’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.

Coming up:

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

PMBOK 7 Perspectives: Tailoring Your Project Approach

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In the Project Management Institute’s latest version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7,) the section on tailoring recognizes that project management isn’t one size or style fits all. Tailoring means that you tweak your project management approach, governance, and processes to your organization’s environment and work at hand. In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll look at organizational factors that should drive project tailoring. 

  • Use familiar methodologies (most of the time.) Deploying a new methodology takes time and practice. In most cases, familiar methods for project design and delivery will yield the best results. When possible, stick with what your team and management are used to.

That doesn’t mean you should never try other methodologies. Introduce them on small projects that aren’t critical, where you can afford to stumble for the benefit of education. Most organizations that have succeeded with agile started small and adapted the approach to leverage its benefits while avoiding its pitfalls. Over time, they became comfortable with agile methods, developed foresight to avoid problems, and obtained the speed and responsiveness agile provides.

  • Accommodate the business’ risk appetite. Although all projects introduce risk, the degree of risk within any given project should reflect the risk tolerance of your business. Businesses with small profit margins or in highly-regulated industries where new approaches require government interpretation and new rulings might not support a risky project. Conversely, small businesses in a highly innovative market might demand fast technological leaps from their projects, which are inherently high risk. 

Tailor your management approach to take into account the project objectives and risk tolerance of your business. Aggressive timelines and new technology are appropriate when higher business risk is acceptable. If you need to reduce risk, use known approaches, conservative timelines, and sufficient time for planning and market testing. 

  • Consider the depth of your customer relationships. Considerable project tailoring may be required based on the relationships you have with your customers and how familiar your customers are with your products and services. If you know your customers and their business processes, you might plan fewer activities to confirm requirements and verify solutions. Conversely, with a new market segment, you should plan for more market analysis, requirements validation and product verification. Whether you are adding an enhanced product to a respected product line or entering a new market with a brand-new offering, tailor your standard project planning and delivery approaches to match. If in doubt, plan more verifications with your customers – you and they will appreciate it! 
  • Be mindful of the pace of change. The pace of change your business and your customers can handle is a significant factor in how you tailor your project and its deliverables. You may be better off delivering your project in small phases if your stakeholders are already dealing with a lot of change. On the other hand, if you need to leapfrog a competitor, moving fast with a significant change may be required. The nature of your business will also impact the pace at which you introduce change. A public utility company needs to be cautious and deliberate to protect vital infrastructure, whereas a web technology company can introduce change very quickly, assess the results and roll back a change with little to no impact. Adopt to the pace of change your business can handle, as it can be the difference between success and complete failure of a project.

For more about project management methodologies, check out Cyndi Snyder Dionisio’s Hybrid Project Management: Do What Works course.

Coming Up: 

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

PMBOK7 Perspectives: Analyzing Stakeholder Attitude

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In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll look at stakeholder attitudes, one of the new approaches to analyzing stakeholders in the Project Management Institute’s latest version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.)

In PMBOK7, Knowledge Areas are replaced with Performance Domains, which recommend additional activities in several areas, including stakeholder analysis. Let’s look at challenging stakeholder attitudes and responses that increase your success in stakeholder management.

  • Inattentive/indifferent. Key stakeholders can behave as if they don’t care about the project or its outcomes even if they would be positively or negatively impacted by those outcomes. They might not pay attention due to their workload, business issues, or other distractions. Remember, your project isn’t the only thing on the stakeholder’s plate.
    • To gain the attention of a distracted stakeholder, talk to the stakeholder’s peers and support staff to find ways to engage the stakeholder.
    • Use clear and persuasive graphics or flowcharts to show how the project might impact the them. Share this information with the stakeholder’s department.
    • Demonstrate that the stakeholder needs to decide between the alternatives by a specific date. Clearly communicate that the project team will make the decision if the stakeholders doesn’t respond by that date. This approach doesn’t guarantee a response from the stakeholder, but it typically gets their attention. If the stakeholder disagrees with your choices, you have documentation that they had an opportunity to make the decision and opted not to.
  • Fearful. Stakeholders who fear negative project outcomes are challenging to manage. Their past experiences may have been bad. Fear can manifest through micromanagement, requests for overly-detailed status reports, and drawn out decision-making.

Talk to your stakeholder to understand their concerns. You may have risk mitigation plans in place that address their fears. Communicate your plans, or create new risk items, and obtain the stakeholder’s approval for the mitigation and status sharing strategies should their concerns come to fruition. You might reduce their fear by demonstrating that you understand their concerns and have plans to address them.

  • Demanding and self-centered. All stakeholders are affected by the project by definition. Some stakeholders act as if they are the only project stakeholder. They place demands on the project without regard for the needs of other project stakeholders. If the demanding stakeholder is your sponsor, that is likely their prerogative. If not, emphasize the other project requirements you are managing with this stakeholder. If they continue to show no regard for other stakeholders, get your sponsor involved to negotiate with this demanding stakeholder. (Remember, the project sponsor is responsible for the project and its outcomes, and wants to see the project succeed.) The sponsor can then help you reprioritize the project requirements. At that point, you can cite the sponsor’s directions when you deal with the demanding stakeholder.
  • Wheeler/dealer. Stakeholders might offer funding or resources for a project in a bid to get their desired outcomes added to a project. They might be extraordinarily persistent! This can seem like a variation on the demanding stakeholder in the previous point. You might consider asking them to work with the sponsor to prioritize their outcomes. It might make sense to introduce new requirements or reprioritize requirements in exchange for benefits. For that reason, the best approach is to handle these proposals through your standard project change management practices.
  • Indecisive. Slow decision-making by stakeholders impacts project schedules — and cost when resources assignments must be extended. Being proactive is the best way to address this situation. Major project decisions have to be made after stakeholders consider the pros and cons of alternatives. Include a specific task, assigned to the sponsor or key stakeholders, delineating the decision to be made and the time allocated for them to research and consider their position. In addition, calculate and communicate what it costs for each day that the major project decision is delayed. This can help illuminate highlight the impact stakeholder indecisiveness has on your project. You can also use this information to create a project change request to alter the project schedule and budget due to the decision-making delays.

Have experience with any or all of these stakeholder attitudes? If you have insights and suggestions for dealing with them, add them in the comments section.

For more about stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.

Coming Up

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

Less Well-Known Benefits of Integration Management

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Photo from collectspace.com

Integration management ensures project planning elements are connected properly, regardless of the methodologies being deployed. Here are some other benefits of integration management you might not have thought about:

Ensures accurate status reporting. A well-integrated project plan ensures that status changes are properly reflected throughout the project, no matter where those changes originate. For example, if you mitigate the risk of cost overruns by reducing the use of contracted skilled resources, tasks might take longer, impacting the project schedule. Other skill-related risks could become more likely. Also, product quality may decline. Impacts to the project often extend beyond one element. Sound integration management ensures you have a complete picture of the status of your project. 

Reduces stakeholder conflict. Project managers need to ensure stakeholders understand their obligations to the project. As new ideas or questions arise during the project, stakeholder obligations can change. Performing integration management ensures changes in obligations are identified early. That prevents conflicts later in the project when the pressure is on and project impacts are more significant.

Here’s an example. After your initial requirements are drafted, your contracts team notices that a vendor’s costs will increase considerably because of new demands from your project. To address this, your organization decides to perform the work in-house. This impacts project stakeholders through workload, cost, and schedule. Although it may be the best solution, sound integration management ensures that stakeholders understand the new project projections and workload impacts. That way, they can negotiate with project sponsors to seek other solutions or agree and respond to the new workload. 

Helps you manage in a virtual world. One of the greatest virtual team risks is increased errors in communication or process. In one example, Team A uses metric measurements and a geographically separate Team B used imperial measures, generating costly errors. Although integration doesn’t guarantee error-free processes, integration management activities do reduce risk. Integrated plans and integrated processes help your virtual teams work in lock-step.

Helps you produce accurate project plans. Ensuring that all project planning elements are properly integrated is a great way to ensure a sound project plan. Have you added a risk mitigation strategy in your risk plan but forgot to add budget for it? Have you added tasks to fulfill your quality plan but neglected to add them to your project schedule? Focus on integration management and you are unlikely to see omissions in your plans. Project planning deliverables will be complete, which helps deliver a successful project! 

Do you have examples of integration management providing project benefits? Share them in the comments section.

For more about integration management, check out Oliver Yarborough’s Project Management Foundations: Integration course.

Coming up:

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects at their LinkedIn Office Hours session, Managing Dependencies in Hybrid Projects, on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Also, even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

Less Well-Known Benefits of Scope Management

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Scope management is all about ensuring your project produces what is required — and only what is required — to satisfy project objectives. It also delivers additional benefits you don’t often hear about:

Helps manage risk. Talk to an experienced project manager and you’ll likely hear a hard-earned lesson: the bigger your project, the riskier it becomes. For initiatives that require a lot of organizational change and project deliverables, you can break down scope into phases to make things more manageable. This breakdown into smaller chunks reduces risk and makes it easier for the organization to absorb the changes because they are applied in progressive steps. In many respects, the most effective way to manage project risk is to work closely with your stakeholders to manage scope.

Expands understanding of business requirements. Scope management is best performed through conversation. And conversation not only helps the project team understand business needs, but also helps the business recognize what is straightforward and what is difficult for the project team to produce.

In addition, good scope management means prioritizing requirements. This helps the project team understand what’s vital to the business and can enhance the business’s perspective on its own requirements! So, the business and the project team are better positioned to produce what’s most important, reducing scope and risk.

Builds confidence in the project. Detailed conversations about scope, including well-crafted questions to gain detailed understanding of business needs, can help build stakeholder confidence in the project team’s ability to meet its objectives. Good questions that inspire analysis and understanding of business needs can build trust that the project team knows what needs to be done. And starting off a project with trust from business stakeholders is a big plus.

Helps adapt to available resources. Skill shortages are everywhere and have been amplified by the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Scope management helps everyone be realistic about what can and cannot be done. Discussions about available skills help craft a realistic project schedule. Scope and resource management drive productive discussions about prioritizing work, particularly for scarce resources. The earlier these conversations and prioritizations are made and understood, the easier it will be to build a sound schedule and proceed through the project lifecycle.

Have you obtained other benefits from scope management? If so, share them with us in the comment section.

For more about scope management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Quality Management

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Photo by Tool., Inc on Unsplash

In addition to producing products without errors or functional issues, quality management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of quality management:

Defines a fundamental requirement. The information needed to complete a quality plan ensures that you understand a fundamental requirement’s grade. Grade, which represents the degree of optional features available in a product, is a significant element of quality and of the product(s) you produce. The required grade can significantly alter your project approach. For example, an entry level car is one that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It includes basic features that helps you get from point A to point B. That is a low-grade vehicle. However, when that entry level car is designed well and lasts a long time, it is a high-quality, low-grade vehicle. In contrast, a top-end luxury car with extra features that breaks down frequently is a low-quality, high-grade vehicle.

The required grade identifies whether the car has a requirement for those multi-way adjustable heated seats! Deliver successful projects by focusing on producing both the desired grade and quality.

Drives fact-based discussions about cost, time, intent and outcomes your project will produce. The degree of quality you build into a product depends on three things; money, time, and skill (and skill costs money.) This interdependence gives the project manager a way to justify requests for additional funding and/or time for higher quality items (which typically require more development, construction, and testing time). In addition, more expensive resources or parts may be required. 

Helps define sound completion criteria. Successful projects share a common characteristic: well-defined completion criteria. The required quality of your deliverables (including grade), components needed, and relevant performance characteristics are vital elements of sound and quantifiable completion criteria.

Protects your reputation. Producing a product for the marketplace without understanding the quality that help it sell would be foolhardy. Producing a deliverable without quality criteria is similar. You’ll waste money and time without proper descriptions of required quality and well-defined quality verification processes. Quality plans protect your business from waste and can highlight the importance of good project management by ensuring that you produce deliverables fit for their purpose. 

Have you achieved other benefits from focusing on quality in your projects? If so, tell us about them in the comments.

For more about quality management , check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Quality course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Communication Management

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Communication management is all about making sure project stakeholders understand the purpose, status, and value the project brings to the business. And it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

  • Greater understanding of stakeholders. Sound communication strategies go both ways and provide excellent opportunities for the project team to understand stakeholder needs and perspectives. This helps create better deliverables today and can help increase the value future projects bring to the business.  In addition, stakeholders who feel understood by the project team are more confident about the current project – as well as in project management as a discipline.
  • Increased project sales prowess. Half the battle for project managers can be selling the value of a project. Executing well-crafted communication plans generates ideas, recognizes business concerns, and identifies valuable business objectives to help define viable projects. 
  • Provides a periodic “project perception management” tool. A foundational piece of a communication plan is the project status report. A status report can shape and manage stakeholder perceptions. Less-experienced project managers view this report as a way to share progress compared to a published plan, which, of course, it is. However, more experienced project managers include other information such as short success stories, opportunities that have arisen, and other news that can improve or reinforce a positive perception of the project and its value to the business. 
  • Identifies vocabulary that gives you the greatest influence. The words stakeholders use to describe business problems and opportunities helps your outgoing project communication to be more meaningful. For example, the information technology lead for your project may draft reports using the phrase “data redundancy and operational integrity.” But if a stakeholder describes their concern with the phrase “data backup and restoration,” it is more effective to use the stakeholder’s terminology in your reports. That way, your communication will be understood and produce the desired reaction.

How have you pushed the benefits of communication within your projects? Share your tips with us in the comments!

For more about communication, check out Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes’s course, Communication Foundations.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Resource Management Strategies When Skilled Resources Are in Short Supply

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Skill shortages have made resource management a significant challenge throughout the business world. That means, you need to ensure that your resources deliver the right output when it’s needed. Here are some tips to manage your skilled resources and make that happen.

  • Define workload priority with management. It’s rare to have a team member fully dedicated to your project; multi-tasking is commonplace. As you get team members assigned to your project, work with their managers to prioritize their assignments. That way, you and your team members will be in sync regarding the time they’re allocated to your project. For example, maybe a team member’s number one priority is to help the finance department close the monthly books, and their second priority is to work on your project. The best approach is to refrain from scheduling that team member on your project during the first week of every month. While inconvenient, it isn’t as painful as getting behind schedule because you scheduled your resource when they aren’t available.
  • Select team members whose skills match the difficulty of the task. You get the best results when a team member has skills that align with the difficulty of the work. If the task is too challenging, your team member could struggle, take too long, and become demoralized. Too easy and the task becomes more annoying than enjoyable—plus, this resource could be used to complete a more difficult task. In other words, the “best and brightest” staff member isn’t always the right person for a task.
  • Embrace positive conflict. Project managers sometimes avoid using team members who have a history of conflict with their colleagues. If the issue is a personality clash, it’s appropriate to find someone else. However, if the conflict relates to how to solve a problem or design a solution, conflicting opinions can generate more and better ideas. Although managing this positive conflict takes more time and effort, the project outcomes can be much better as a result. Take a page from the philosophy of former US President Abraham Lincoln; assemble a “team of rivals” to get the best project results.
  • Temporarily trade duties with team leaders or technical managers. Some team leaders and technical managers often wish they could drop their leadership and administrative duties and return to producing technical deliverables. Why not give them a chance to do just that? As a project manager, I’ve often temporarily taken administrative duties from a team leader or manager in exchange for them working on a technical task on my project. That gives a valuable resource the opportunity to practice their craft, and you get a better result for your project. It’s a win-win!

Do you have any tips or tricks for using skilled resources to the best advantage? Add them in the comments section!

For more about resource management, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.