This week in Project Management and Leadership (21-27 Jan 2013)

Project Managers don’t have time to do personal knowledge management?

Michael Norton has referred a Fonality 2011 survey that points out the knowledge workers in SMEs spends more than 50% of their days’ time in doing non-productive work e.g. contacting customers, setting up meeting, finding information, duplicating information, etc. So author puts forth – can personal knowledge management be a solution to this problem. So what is personal knowledge management? This article states ‘personal KM is about developing effective knowledge sharing and culture to collaborate with the ‘collect, filter, and process, organize and review’ technique. He also suggests using scheduling tool to organize activities as well as social networks to quickly access right people.

Top 10 trends of Project Management in 2013.

Based on article published by ESI International (a project training organization), computer weekly has been publishing series of top 10 trends of project management in 2013, In this, it talks about broader perspective of being a project manager or playing a role thereof.  The other trends covered are

• General leadership training requirement for project managers will grow
• Organizations will continue to under-estimate agile methodologies. For failure of these project companies will attribute to agile methodologies without understanding it correctly, without investing on training, working on cultural changes, etc.

Top 10 IT Project Management Trends for 2013?

In this post eWeek has enlisted, top 10 IT project management trends for 2013? Again this article is based on ESI International’s report but for IT Project Management. It emphasizes on ‘Control of the data’ and enlist trends such as

• The training focus will remain on hard skills of project management in 2013
• Agile methodologies has reduced cost, speed up time to market but organizations will attribute failure of project to agile methodology instead of identifying root causes like lack of agile training for team members, imbibing cultural aspects to accommodate agile methodology
• Vendor management skills will be rated higher in the list of skillset for project managers
• Project management office (PMO) will be under pressure to improve project performance, In 2013, despite of allocating enough resource and time, the degrading project performance will be question the existence of PMO?

Fostering Cultural Awareness — Right from the Start

Conrado Morlan, the PMP certified professional in PMI blog – Voices on Project Management has shared his experiences – how to manage cultural differences among team members dispersed globally. He has referred cultural context levels as described by anthropologist Edward T. Hall e.g. countries like Latin American, Indian, Italian, and Chinese are considered higher context cultures. And typically higher context cultures place great value on interpersonal relationships. On the other hand there are lower context cultures such as United States of America, United Kingdom and Germany which emphasize on directness and logic.

Further, the author has described how he was able to manage cultural differences for Brazilian and American teams because he carefully observed cultural differences, took notes, made his team members aware of those. Thus he had included cultural differences on the agenda for every first team meeting.

Leadership

Getting More Women in Leadership

Writer, NICHOLAS KRISTOF has discussed a book and her views about having women in leadership positions. Author referred ‘Sheryl Sandberg’s upcoming book about gender gap in US and elsewhere. According to Nicholas, the book has pointed the part of problem is women are not assertiveness enough to be a leader.

 Nicholas further mentions that “one of the key factors for women to succeed is a flexible and supportive partner” because women are largely stuck in doing household activities. Having a strong support of partner makes a big difference. Also she puts forth reasons why there should be more women in leadership position – “to change gender stereotypes and to achieve more diverse and better decision-making”

Martin Luther King’s Leadership Lessons for Us All

Paul Schmitz in this post renders Martin Luther King’s leadership lessons. The better takeaway from his legacy is “Everybody can be great because anybody can lead.” rather than “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve”. Interestingly the article delve about many other people involved in the movement who deliberately chose MLK to lead and had contributed significantly for the movement to succeed and that one should not forget in such change/movement few get recognized as leader while there are countless others who contribute silently for the leadership to succeed.

“Leadership is an action, not a position”

DLD 2013: creative leadership award goes to architect

This entry is slight off-the topic but I found it interesting.

In the DLD conference, the organizer has recognized an architect who has been delivering innovative designs for structural buildings. The interesting point to note here is ‘There are creative people. There are leaders. Typically creative people do not consider themselves as leaders. And leading by innovation is what recognizes them for leadership.

Think Like Zuck: How Leadership Diversity Sparks Innovation

Meghan M. Biro , the contributor for Forbes has referred Ekaterina Walter’s book, Think Like Zuck. And while reviewing this book, she states that this book is different from other books because it highlights Zuck’s leadership for fostering “the power of diversity in innovation”.

• Yin Needs Yang : Five “musts” for business success: passion, purpose, people, product, partnership. One can complement his/her own capabilities with others for success of a company
• Two Brains (and Personalities) Are Better Than One: “people with more diverse sources of information generated consistently better ideas.”
• E Pluribus – “Group diversity leads to better innovation than a genius inventor”

Image source: Boise State University

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