Every week, someone tells me the same thing. "Scott, the project is failing." Nope. The project isn't failing. The decisions being made around the project are. That may sound harsh, but it matters because you can't fix a project if you're blaming the wrong thing. Projects don't wake up one morning and decide to go
If you ask ten people to define a project, you’ll probably get ten different answers. Some will tell you it’s a schedule. Others will point to a Gantt chart. Someone else will say it’s a budget. A few will start talking about Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or whatever methodology is trending in your organization this week.
One of the hardest transitions veterans make has nothing to do with finding a job. It has everything to do with learning how to introduce themselves again. For years, your identity was clear. Your uniform told people who you were. Your rank communicates experience. Your badges reflected the schools you completed. Your tabs represented years
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to settle. It happens gradually. One comfortable decision at a time. You hit the snooze button because you stayed up too late. You skip the workout because you’ll “make it up tomorrow.” You avoid the difficult conversation because today isn’t the right day. You keep the job you
Every failed project has a story. Sometimes it’s poor planning. Sometimes it’s unrealistic deadlines. Sometimes it’s weak leadership. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll almost always find one common thread. Someone assumed something. “We assumed the requirements were final.” “We assumed IT was handling that.” “We assumed the customer approved the design.” “We assumed
Walk into almost any organization, and you’ll see calendars packed with meetings. Daily standups. Weekly status meetings. Executive reviews. Steering committees. Planning sessions. Risk reviews. Lessons learned. People spend hours every week talking about work. Then they leave the room and execute completely different plans. The problem isn’t the number of meetings. The problem is
One of the hardest lessons veterans learn after leaving the military isn't that civilians have lower standards. It's that they have different standards. And if you never understand that distinction, you'll spend years frustrated. I've heard it thousands of times. "Nobody cares." "They don't have any discipline." "They accept mediocrity." "They're lazy." Sometimes that's true.
Most people don't fail all at once. Businesses don't collapse overnight. Marriages don't suddenly fall apart. Careers don't implode in a single meeting. Faith isn't usually lost in one moment. Health isn't destroyed by one meal. Life rarely ends because of one catastrophic decision. Instead... It dies by 1%. A little less discipline today. A
I’m going to say something that will probably upset a few project managers. Scope creep is usually your fault. Not always, but far more often than we’d like to admit. For decades, we’ve treated scope creep like it’s some unavoidable monster that sneaks into projects in the middle of the night. We blame customers. We
There is a dangerous misconception in project management that refuses to die. That misconception is that the more people appear to be working, the healthier the project must be. It’s total and absolute nonsense. I’ve walked into projects where every calendar was packed, every team member was exhausted, Slack and Teams notifications never stopped, meetings
