In the age of nano attention-spans of people, the tendency and respect for planning things upfront has taken a serious beating. The mainstream logic is to simply ‘play by the ear’ because there are far too many moving parts to be completely accounted for and properly factored-in – and in any case, by the time [...]

How do you decide what tasks to schedule first: the complex ones or the easy ones? the short ones or the long ones? the risky ones or the sure-shot ones? Most often, this task sequence is determined by hard logic, soft logic, or some other external constraints. However, how do you decide when there are [...]

For decades now, the project management world is divided between top-down estimation and bottom-up estimation. While a top-down approach might have limitations, it perhaps is the only way to get some meaningful estimates at the start of a project. A bottom-up approach might be a great way to get more accurate and reliable estimates but [...]

Congratulations! You’ve got the long-cherished promotion that will make you manager – of your own buddies! You don’t quite know what it means for your relations with the team – are you better-off as their manager or as their buddy? One key challenge with first-line managers, especially those fairly new in their roles, is how [...]

Risk is generally assumed to have negative impact. However, a ‘risk’ can also have a positive impact. PMBOK 4/e talks of positive risks and calls them ‘opportunities’. Given that most project managers only have a passing knowledge of managing risks proactively (our industry still seems to reward crisis management notwithstanding the fact that most often [...]

Imagine driving down a country road when a street dog starts chasing your car? The dog ‘attacks’ the car but by the time gets it closer to the car, the car has moved ahead, and so the dog changes direction and attacks at new coordinates. This game goes on for some time, but because the [...]

While being in the jobmarket is hard for most, it also evokes romantic visions of getting a great career break at this fabulous company known for its excellent culture, cool products, bleeding edge technology and cut-above-the-rest compensation! Most of us use that as an opportunity to critically examine our strengths and weekenesses, our USP, our inner [...]

Those racy commercials look so unbelievable and comical – a scrawny half-man-half-boy drowns himself in a chemical that promises to be the Aphrodisiac Ultimate, and in comes flocking an army of semi-nude women and mob him comprehensively and the Axe Defect is complete! The chemical instantly obliterates all imperfections and turns a below-average Joe into [...]

Let’s face it – being a project manager is not for everyone. We place a truckload of expectations on a project manager and then use an extremely asymmetric yardstick to evaluate their work – when a project succeeds, we attribute it to the organization, the culture, the team, and the management support, but when the [...]

In today’s times when budgets are tight, promotions are slow and the amount of new product development opportunities rare, it is not easy to motivate your team members. As a project manager, you don’t have so many tools or resources at your disposal to engage your team members in a meaningful dialog to enhance their [...]