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.
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
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
If I asked ten people to define project management, I’d probably get ten different answers. Someone would say schedules. Someone would say meetings. Someone would say Gantt charts. Someone would say risk logs. Someone would say PowerPoint. And at least one person would say: “It’s the people who ask for status updates.” That’s unfortunate. Because
Too many projects fail before they ever begin. Not because the team wasn’t talented. Not because leadership didn’t care. Not because funding disappeared. They fail because somebody finger-drilled requirements. Everyone nodded. Everyone assumed. Everyone moved. And months later, the project team is standing in front of stakeholders explaining why the thing they delivered isn’t the
Scope creep is one of the most overused excuses in project management. Project managers love blaming stakeholders for it. “They kept changing requirements.” “The client wouldn’t stop asking for more.” “Leadership kept adding deliverables.” “The team just kept saying yes.” No. Stop it. In most cases, scope creep is your fault. Full stop. That statement
One of the biggest reasons people fail in project management is because they don’t actually understand what a project is. That sounds ridiculous, right? “How can someone be in project management and not know what a project is?” Easy. Because most people label work incorrectly. They call projects “tasks.” They call initiatives “quick wins. They
It’s not a slide deck. It’s not a town hall. It’s not an email sent at 4:47 PM on a Friday with the subject line: “Exciting Organizational Updates.” And it sure as hell isn’t leadership announcing a major shift and then disappearing while everyone else is left trying to figure out what it means for
Most people think they understand project leadership. They don’t. They confuse it with task tracking, meeting facilitation, and status reporting. They think if they can build a decent schedule, send a weekly update, and keep stakeholders “informed,” they’re leading. They’re not. They’re organizing work. And that distinction is where most projects quietly start to fail.
