8 Commandments for Project Manager

Sami Taipale

1. CARE

This is where it all starts from. You have to care about things to do them well. Care about your team. Care about your customers. Care about the product. Care about the scope, schedule, budget and quality. Care about what needs to be done and what must be left out. Care about the users. Care about sponsors and your boss. Care about yourself.

“Caring gives you a compass, a direction to head and most of all, a reason to do the work you do in the first place.

Care More.” - Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/05/the-simple-antidote-to-a-corporatized-unfeeling-profit-maximizing-world.html

2. HELP

“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What's in it for me?’”― Brian Tracy

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can’t help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

- Colin Powell

3. LISTEN

"Just being available and attentive is a great way to use listening as a management tool. Some employees will come in, talk for twenty minutes, and leave having solved their problems entirely by themselves."

— Nicholas V. Luppa

4. COMMUNICATE

WhyHowWhatWhen

To Whom ?

“Communication is like engine oil: it needs to be applied to the machinery or the machinery will not start or, if it does, it will quickly falter and grind to a halt.” - Max Wideman

http://www.maxwideman.com/musings/lifeblood.htm

5. MEASURE( W I S E L Y )

“Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get.”

– H. Thomas Johnson

“It's a lot easier to get metrics wrong than right, and the damage done from getting them wrong usually exceeds the potential benefit from getting them right.”

http://www.infoworld.com/t/it-strategy/the-four-fallacies-it-metrics-181517

6. PLAN

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but

planning is indispensable.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower

a.) Plan your project.

b.) Plan your workdays.

 If you don't have daily objectives, you qualify as a dreamer.

- Zig Ziglar

7. ADAPT

“The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.”

- Dave E. Smalley

But on the other hand...

“Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.”

- Edwin Louis Cole

The more the changes in your enviroment, the more agi le and adaptable you must be.

8. PRIORITIZE

“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.” - Brian Tracy

THANK YOUSami Taipale

Project Manager / Agile Coach / Trainer

http://fi.linkedin.com/in/samitaipale