Last week I started talking about the practices of bad project managers, but I ran out of room! So here is the rest of the list, just in case you didn't find yourself (or your project manager) in last week's post.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.  - Helen Keller

I started penning a positive and inspirational piece on the practices to which all good project managers should aspire. However, halfway through I thought it would be interesting to approach the topic from the opposite direction, discussing things every project manager should NOT do. From some of the projects I've seen, it's obvious there are quite a few managers who don't quite get it - yet. (And I've been reading Scott Adams, can you tell?)

 

There are a multitude of great quotes and adages which should be beacons of truth for all project managers. One of my favorites is "failing to plan is planning to fail". It might be intuitively obvious to most of us, but not all project managers (or their managers or customers or their teams) seem to get it.

My name is Pat Gray, and I've been invited by Clarizen to share some of my irreverent views on project management. I've been in the computer business for over 25 years, writing code and documentation, managing systems and managing projects. For me, the best feeling in the world is hearing a customer's "thank you" at the end of the project, and knowing they really mean it.

To the Clarizen Community,

Today is the day that we go live with Clarizen v4.8. It might sound, by its numbering, like a minor release but we have packed a lot of punch into this one. I will let Rachel, Clarizen VP of Products, and Dan, Clarizen’s Senior Product Manager get into the details of the features in their blog posts and in this post I will tell you about how we are rolling out this release and what it means for you.

In the world of project management, words such as risk, fallback and mitigation plan are the ABCs every project manager internalizes early on and uses on a daily if not hourly basis. It is the experienced project managers who know how to identify and manage these processes accurately and quickly leading to successful projects that are completed on time and within budget.

With the launch of Clarizen V4.8, I’m very excited to share with you some of our newly introduced features, giving you the “director’s cut” with built-in narration from the product manager’s point of view. Stressing the global picture and motivation that led us to focus on these features.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good topic for a blog post for quite some time now. Some ideas that crossed my mind included the BP oil spill, Mel Gibson’s psychosis, and Clarizen’s Integration with Zendesk, yet none of them made it past the first paragraph. For some reason I was uninspired by writing about the ranting and ravings of a clearly sick man, nor the horror that is the worst environmental disaster humanity has ever seen. And while the Clarizen/Zendesk Integration is a phenomenal tool, it too failed to inspire my writings.

I read a great tweet this morning:

Predictability, or lack of predictability in some case, is what makes life interesting. At times there is comfort in knowing there will be meatloaf every Monday night for dinner, or that there is no rain forecasted for the foreseeable future. But at other times it is the dynamic pulse of life that drives us, the lack of predictability that keeps us on our toes and compels us to bring that umbrella, just in case.

TopTenReviews, the leading comparison website that specializes in in-depth side by side reviews in the really competitive fields out there like in software, electronics, web services and more, just gave Clarizen a huge endorsement as the #1 Online Project Management Solution.

Three things about human nature that you are probably pretty familiar with. One…People like to be nay sayers. It is easier to bash someone else’s initiative than come up with your own. When it comes to introducing Social Media into your organization, you are certain to come up against a slew of reasons why it can’t succeed. Two… people don’t like change. Some of the reasons Social Media can’t succeed are more legitimate than others. But as it is human nature, people will resist change including the introduction of cool new tools that will probably significantly improve productivity. And three…people are risk adverse. People prefer to keep it safe and not step into the wilderness (not true of everyone obviously but lets agree that in a corporate environment, risk is its own beast and needs to be approached carefully).

If you have been following my posts recently (Part 1 and Part 2 of the Social Media for Project Management Series), you can see that working in the marketing department at a project management company has made me a bit fixated on social media and its impact on project management.