Summer is upon us. The sun is shining and we are daydreaming about being on the beach, on a boat or anywhere else but our desk. With all the excitement and distractions of summer, there’s a good chance that our productivity will drop. Here are a few tips how you can keep up your productivity at work during summer.
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Communication is a central part in every aspect of our lives and the ability to communicate effectively helps foster positive relationships – especially in a professional environment. Here are some tips to help you become a better communicator.
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Deadlines and budget limits are overrun, your project team is overloaded with work and the positive spirit that was prevalent at the beginning vanished into thin air. All this signals: Your project is en route to failure. Not necessarily – you can still change tack and here’s how.
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We closed last week’s blog post with the finding that management and leadership are two sides of one medal – a successful organization, can’t do without either one. This leaves us still with the question, what are leadership essentials? |
Leadership is on everyone’s lips, the great majority of job listings ask candidates to have “strong leadership skills” and academic institutions continuously create new leadership courses and workshops. But what exactly is this famous leadership? And how is it different from management?
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What was once known as Hell’s Kitchen and lately one of the grittiest parts of Manhattan is in the process of becoming an area packed with flashy skyscrapers. At the head of this mega project stands a construction project manager.
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When we think of project management, a lot of buzz words come to our mind: planning, deadlines, tasks, limited resources, coordination, etc. One of the essentials in any project is the head to it – the project manager. |
Multitasking in project teams is not desirable, because it is not efficient. That was the core statement of the last post. Switching from task to task means that there are always switch costs which can amount up to 40 percent of the daily work time on an average work day. That means that almost half of the work time might be used to get back to the original task after being interrupted.
That’s why reducing multitasking to a minimum and creating spaces for uninterrupted, concentrated work should be in everyone’s interest.
There are starting points on all levels – in the organization itself, the management team and in the self-organization of each team member.
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Ideal project team members have to have many traits these days: They have to be flexible and resilient, team players and multitaskers. Multitaskers? Really? There is increasing recognition amongst researchers that multitasking causes efficiency and time loss. Often, it makes it difficult to focus on a complex task. |
Every January, we dig our New Year’s resolutions out of the relic box – and exercising more and eating healthy are always top of the list.
However, what can project managers resolve to do in 2014? A healthier lifestyle will do no harm to any of us, but the beginning of a new year can also be a great opportunity to do things better than last year.
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