Guidelines for Managing Project Politics

Read the first part of this post: About Project Politics. Projects and Politics are inextricably linked which means that there is not a single organisational project in which there is not a need to actively manage Politics. Important as it is to identify and manage project Politics by applying the appropriate strategy to manage them, …

About Project Politics

No project is politics-free. Most projects run within organisations, so they inherit existing organizational and office politics and often become a natural arena of political activities. Moreover, as a new endeavour with achievements to be acknowledged and potential failure to be managed, projects also create their own politics. Project politics are often seen as a …

The Four Operating Zones

At any given moment, we find ourselves operating in one of four zones. These zones are differentiated based on how comfortable we feel operating in them and on the potential benefits and risks associate with the pursuit of goals found in these spaces. I will refer to these four zones as the Comfort, Productivity, Opportunity …

About Management Debt

Debt: the result of borrowing from the future to overcome challenges of the present.  As your organisation grows and evolves, you might observe that adding new services, integrating new staff, and implementing organisational changes and improvements becomes difficult and slow to implement. Often this happens because the organisation’s management infrastructure (i.e. management structures, processes, systems, …

The Art in Project Management

In the field of project management, we are very used to talking about the good project manager. But what is a good project manager? There are reams and reams of books about how to be —or become—that person who knows how to do the scheduling, the budgeting, all the technical aspects of the profession. But …

The Project Manager with the Magic Touch

"Ze girl? She seems like a very nice girl. She "plays" monsieur, like a very nice girl.  However, it ztinks! Is not so hard to understand: Her playing, very polite. Mistake, no. It says E-flat, she plays E-flat. Ping-ping. Hit the right note, always, very proper. Look, monsieur, play the piano,  is not about the fingers. "Done"  with the fingers, yes. But the music, she is inside. …

Defining Productive Efficiency

Efficiency is a futile pursuit when not pursued in the context of effectiveness, i.e. in the context of achieving worthy goals. But how effective can we be if we are not minimizing wasteful efforts? How much efficiency is desirable? What is the optimal level of efficiency that maximizes our overall effectiveness? What is Productive Efficiency? …

Aristotle and Effective Intelligence

Aristotle's virtues' philosophy provides the foundation for the concept of Effective Intelligence (FI), as it connects the goals of success and happiness (or well-being) to the core virtues needed before one can be effective in their pursuit. Effective intelligence (FI) is defined as one's ability to set and achieve valuable and meaningful goals that contribute towards achieving …

Working “for” or “with”?

It usually takes time and some professional maturity before one even cares to notice how others (people and organisations) frame their working relationship.  It takes time because the dominant paradigm implies that a working relationship of employment means that we work for people or organisations that pay us money in return for "work". It is traditional, proven and tried, we accept …

The Valuable Time of Maturity

“I counted my years and discovered that I have fewer years left to live compared to the time I have lived until now. I feel like a kid who won a bag of goodies: at first he ate them eagerly, but when he realized that there were only few, he began to savour them deeply. I have no …