Category: Behaviour

Glued to your phone? Of course you are!

There is an ongoing hum of concern about the effect the smartphone has on our lives. For many of us, the first thing we do in the morning is reach for our smartphone. People complain that others are glued to their phone and don’t talk to those they are with. We have laws to criminalise people…

Don’t do a Dory

Is this your natural approach to a problem? “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” is proverb many of us are brought up with. Try harder, try harder. That’s what we get at school every time we get poor results in a Maths test or an English test. Just try harder. So,…

Making Baby Bear’s porridge : Dealing with the gold-plater on your team

What is a gold-plater? A commonly voiced frustration when you get a group of project managers together is dealing with gold-platers. To them, a gold-plater is someone who cannot finish their work and release it to the client. They have to keep refining it and polishing it until it is perfect before they let it…

When the going gets tough…….Overcoming the fear of failure

One of our biggest challenges in working with a team is keeping people motivated when things get hard. Why does one person work themselves into the ground doing far more work than is necessary, while another spends hours on anything other than the thing they are supposed to do? Why does one sail along…

Old School Tricks for getting the best from your Project Management Conference

At the recent Ground Control conference, I was talking to some digital project managers who were saying how much they valued the conference, how enlightening it was to talk with other project managers and how important such self-development is, but also how difficult it is to get the space to do it. Even while they…

Are you the Project Hero? Or are you stuck in the Drama Triangle?

As a project manager or lead BA do you ever find yourself stuck in this role? There is conflict between other members of the team and you feel you must go and sort things out for them. This plays out over and over again and you wonder if you have turned into some kind of…

Am I doing my user stories right? The team aren’t getting it.

Recently I was working with a BA to explore why the user stories she is creating are not being followed by some of her team. About the Team She is in the situation many people in large organisations are in. She is in an Agile team where part of the team is co-located with the…

Business Change – The Kubler-Ross Model

My interest in change management and behaviour started with my very first IT project. Although the Project manager said the users wanted a new tool, just putting it out there meant it was ignored. At first, I couldn’t understand this. I thought it was a case of ‘build it and they will come!’. Then…