Back when I was a newspaper editor, I got into a monumental special edition, our self-congratulatory recognition of the paper’s 150th anniversary. It made a lot of money, but our management of it failed to match the grand expectations in other respects. The organization mostly treated the matter as a replication of what we all did every day, only bigger and with a more extended schedule.
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With organizations increasingly adopting distributed team approaches for their workforce, new and frequently unanticipated communication challenges are surfacing requiring novel or at least highly considered approaches to solve. Project teams particularly are susceptible to many of these issues as, by their very nature project teams are formed for a specific task and then dissolve either back into the host organization or, into the more general workforce. Many insights gained in one project can easily be lost to future projects.

Among the many novel challenges which are typically encountered by these distributed teams is the question of how to best manage communications between office locations, when the offices may be separated not just by distance but also by time zones.
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Why, as project managers, do we think that what worked on our last project will work on our current one? If the definition of a project revolves around it being unique, why do we try to standardize our approach so much? Checklists, templates, a PMO mantra of “this is how you should do project management” isn’t necessarily well received, especially during the early stages of product development.
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One of the most important skills a project manager has is being able to communicate effectively with the team. Project managers need to know when to communicate, when not to communicate, and how to do it effectively. Having good communication skills means knowing the the right format – should I email this person, call her, or schedule a meeting in person?
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Back in the age when the Romans ruled much of the world, there was a special place, located in what we now collectively call the Middle East, where three major roads met: the road leading northwest to Europe, the road leading south to Africa, and the road leading east to Asia. At the meeting place of these three roads was, so the story goes, a giant pole, upon which passers-by would post messages to other passers-by, in the hope and expectation that the private messages would be delivered to their destinations...
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Project managers are often mystified by the amount of “paperwork” that the average project requires. Even if handled on a computer without a single sheet of actual paper being touched, there seems to be an inordinate amount of writing standing between a project manager and the perceived reality of actually doing things. The temptation is great to bypass all of this bureaucratic writing, or at least put it off to the end of the project, but such thoughts are very dangerous.
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One of the challenges that Project Managers encounter as they work through the project in front of them is to find the time to step away from the Gantt charts and the email for a while and actually go and talk to a few people.

The temptation to stay shuttered away in one’s office is huge – after all there is always so much to get done, and having a smartphone means never having to say you’re unavailable. This leads to a profound change in the physiology of any busy person (not just Project Managers), in which their minds stay in a state of siege, prepared mostly for reaction and seldom for interaction.
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Over the last 2 months we have seen a lot of coverage of the rollout of the healthcare.gov rollout. A lot of the coverage may have taken a slant towards one political side or the other, but as Project Managers, we can take a few really valuable lessons from the rollout of the healthcare.gov website and how you can learn from their actions to make your next projects better.
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For the past couple years, I’ve been leading workshops and teaching Berklee Online courses about project management, aimed mostly at those working in the music industry. A trend I’m finding among my students is that many of them arrive at my doorstep feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of their work. They have so many concerts, recordings, teaching responsibilities, gigs, and other endeavors in their lives that they feel it is all out of control.
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