Speaker 1: Are you looking for some project management tips from someone who's wise? Someone who's been around the block? Someone who's worked in different industries? Hey, you got me. Guess what? I'm going to share with you some tips, really instrumental tips, that I have used as a consultant on projects on different organizations. So you know what? Let's get to it. Now I also have something really cool for you. It's underneath this video. It is a link to a free webinar on project management top five things as a very experienced project manager. I always do and I'm sharing it with you. So look, go. It's gonna help you. It's only gonna be a positive thing. So that's for you. My gift. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. My name is Adriana Gerdler and you have landed on the best practical project management channel out there in YouTube world. My personal opinion. I would love it if you subscribe to this channel because we're giving out great content every single week and it tells YouTube we're doing a good job. Now on that note, let me share with you the tips that I use as a seasoned professional. Don't avoid conflict. I knew this number one on reason, for a really good reason. Conflict. When you're dealing with projects, you're dealing with people and different personalities, you are gonna have conflicts. You're gonna have conflicts. You're gonna have differences of opinion. So it becomes really important that you know how to deal with it. If you don't deal with it, it's gonna derail you. Now the best way to deal with conflict is to be neutral. To address it head-on. So if something arises, speak to the person one-on-one or if it's within a group, stop the group and say, hey guys, let's resolve this. Let's really hear everybody out. That becomes really important. Now I have a story for you. So my story and I'm gonna because confidentiality and I still work with all these clients over all these years. So I had one client, extremely big organization. In fact, if I told you the name, you'd all go, we know that company because they're that big. And I was starting a new project and the conflict that I was dealing with was with an individual who definitely felt like she had a personal agenda. And every single time that we were dealing with something, she'd always kind of throw a wrench in it. So instead of going with the flow and agreeing, she may give half-hearted agreements and then afterwards go to her manager and cause a lot of ruckus and trouble to a point where there was a lot of work. Like oh my goodness, the amount of work just to get everything back on track. It was unnecessary in my opinion. It felt like she had a personal agenda. Now on her side, maybe she's just really passionate about something. So what I did and this is why I want to share it with you how to do it as a seasoned professional, is I actually connected with her and we had a one-on-one and we sat down and I said, look so-and-so, let's talk about what's going on. And I just really laid it out and I found out from her that she was not happy with the direction we were going, even though we got her marching orders, even though they were approved. And she really felt strongly that it wasn't the right direction. And I had to explain to her, like look, I get it. I appreciate where you're coming from, but we've already gone through the channels, proper channel. We did a change control. I've already got approval from this and senior executives do not want to change the scope. So at this particular point, I need you to come on board. She couldn't do it. She just literally said, I can't do it. I don't agree. So I appreciate that. So what we did instead is I spoke to her and I said, listen, are you okay if we bring your manager in? I'll bring in the sponsor and let's really talk about whether or not this is a right fit for you now. Because the amount of work that she's doing and she even admitted it too, like all the extra work trying to stop and her opinion needs to go on, the extra work that I was doing, the derailing that was happening wasn't happy for anybody. And we came to the conclusion that this probably, not probably, it wasn't the right fit for her. And as a result she was put on a different project and we got a new person to replace her and it was perfect, was the perfect fit. And that really was something that because I didn't avoid the conflict, I addressed it but done it respectfully, done it one-on- one with the person first before we bring in other like their managers and hire up people to get confirmation, just shows that you're on top of things. You can't avoid it because can you imagine working on a project for the full project where someone's trying to derail it? So you really do have to nip this in the bud. Understand the project life cycles. In fact, live by the project life cycles because every project goes through a project life cycle. Now if you're asking me, Adriana, what's a project life cycle? I got you covered. Initiation stage is first one. Planning is second. Execution is third. Monitoring control is fourth. And the fifth, last but not least, is closing. Every project goes through those life cycles and it doesn't matter what methodology you're using as a project to execute it, they all go through that. So it's really important that you understand it because you now need to educate the people on your team, particularly senior executives, in the beginning of the project. It is so easy for someone to say to you, and I've had this happen on projects, in fact one that I'm working on right now, and it's like, okay, you've got this marching order, go, get it going. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not ready to execute the project yet. I got a plan, but even more so, I got to talk about initiation. And what's an initiation? I need to finalize a scope statement. I got to do the priority matrix. And if you're wondering what all that stuff is, guys, don't worry. Search bar, Adriana Gerdler, put those words in there. I promise you I got lots of videos that you can take a look at to get more info. But it becomes really important that you have to educate other people, and you do not move forward until you have that all done. Because if you don't follow the stages, it will bite you. Now the cool thing is with the stages when it comes to planning, monitoring, and sorry, execution and monitoring, that is cyclical and it's reiterative. So every single time something happens, you're constantly going back in that circle. So just take note, follow it, ensure that you're doing the right things. If you're wondering, Adriana, I need more information on that, good news, I have a course, Slave Project Management, little shameless plug, link is below this video. It actually goes through the cycles with all of, like all those stages, with all the templates, everything you need in order to be successful. Stuff that I use actually on my own projects. So understanding those life cycles is just the framework of how projects run. And that's helped me out tremendously, whether it's a huge project or a small project, they all go through it. Stay on top of documentation. With your team, be very clear with the expectations regarding documentation, note-taking, anything that's going to ensure agreements to projects, ways of working, etc. So now this is a project that I had team members who were third- party vendors. So not consultants, they were actually vendors. And so I had this one third party who was like a middleman for us as the client, so I was kind of like pretending I was a client. Well, that's the wrong word. I was working on behalf of the client and this third-party vendor was like the middleman for another third-party manufacturer. So they were the go-between. They called a meeting, it was their meeting, I have a strict rule, hey, when's your meeting, you got to own it, facilitate it, take notes on it, the whole nine yards. We were talking about a lot of important stuff and I made the assumption that everything was being taken care of and we presented stuff and we were told by the third-party manufacturer, no, no, no, we can't do that. So then when the meeting was over, we asked for, hey, give us a solution. Three weeks went by and guess what? They gave us the exact same solution we gave them that they told us they couldn't do. I'm like, hey. So I went to the meeting facilitator, I said, hey, can you bring us those notes? We need to like have a meeting and saying, hey, this is what we brought to you. Like we had to do some course correction. They had none. It's like you have to be joking. You have none. So as a result, it made it very difficult for us to show the proof of what was going on because we didn't have those notes itself. So now moving forward, I'm like, no way. I'm very clear with the expectations. I let everybody know. In fact, when I go into meetings, I actually say, who's the note taker and where are you guys keeping your notes? Please ensure you send them right after the meeting. I'm not even the facilitator. It doesn't matter even who is running it. I say that immediately because it really ensures and someone goes, oh, shoot, I'm going to do it. So just be really on top of the documentation and it's better to document it, type it out, put it on a Word doc, OneNote, whatever it is. It's going to have more power to it. Be prepared for risk. It's quite interesting. There's two things that people do in projects that they cancel, which is the most stupidest thing that they should be canceling. One is training for the end user. For some reason, when time is tight, what's the first thing that people do? Let's cut the training session. Are you serious? These are the people who are going to use it. You got to train. The other thing that people do is risk. Oh, we need to have a risk session. Of course we need to have a risk session. Okay, you build the risk session and then all of a sudden, oh, we can't attend and it gets bump, bump, bump to a point where it doesn't happen. I'm letting you know you need to do risk. I've had a project before, high profile project. We did a risk session. I got lots of complaints. Why are we doing this? Blah, blah, blah. And I said, no, we got to do it. It was a one-day event. Sometimes risk sessions can be painful. It's like going to the dentist pulling teeth because you're literally just line by line by line. I have done them to try to make it a little more interesting. But anyway, it is a must. So now project proceeds. Everything is fine. Guess what? A risk happened. The risk that we didn't even think was gonna happen, but we had a contingency and a mitigation plan for it. Oh my goodness, let me tell you, my client, the executives, they were ecstatic patting themselves on the back that they did the risk session. I'm like, okay, whatever. If you guys want that, go for it because it just means our project is successful. So that's something for sure. You really need to do the risk. You can't predict risk and if it comes to fruition and you don't have anything like a contingency or mitigation plan, it looks bad on you and the finger will be pointed at you. So even if you just do with a few group of people or even it's just yourself so that you have it as a project plan and as a backup, worth it. Worth it. Learn from the past. Please, please learn from the past. Don't do things in the past and then repeat them again. Okay, so what do I mean by this? When we learn from the past, we know exactly it is what we want to do and that's only additional information. In fact, as project managers, we do lessons learned all the time. Postmortems, after-action reviews, whatever you want to call them. In fact, I have a video on lessons learned. You can go search for Adriana and lessons learned and you'll find it to get more information on that. But here's how I now use lessons learned to help me be successful in future projects. So I had this other client. Again, these are all real clients and it was again a big, big organization, global mandate and this particular individual brought me on. He was overseeing this customer-centric project, which actually was really, really cool and he was bringing me on to be a consultant for him and to also execute on some project management stuff. So he himself was not a project manager and was a really big project and needed project managing, so brought me in. I was like his right hand. So there were times as we were doing this, I just assumed…see and that's the problem…I assumed he would listen to all the advice I was giving him. But what actually happened is there were a lot of times when he would make a decision I'd be like, don't do it. It's the wrong thing. It's gonna cause confusion. There's too much going on. He chose to do it anyway. So what I found in the end is that because of that, that particular project didn't have really a high success rate. I didn't even have much control over what was going on because individually it was this person. So what I now do is I am very clear with all my clients. When I tell you notice something, there's really good reason why. I need you to follow through and if not, we need to document it, trace it, we need to bring it high up. So I have now these rules in place to ensure. But I really listen to the lessons learned. I don't make the same mistake twice because when you get burned, you've got to learn from it. And so for sure, for sure, focus on those lessons learned and learn from it. It's valuable. Whether it's a good value…not a good value…whether it's a good experience or a bad experience, it is something to take note of. It's gonna make you better. It's gonna ensure more success in your future. Yay. You've made it to the end. And just like I said in the beginning, I have that free webinar for you. I highly recommend you go under this video to the link for that free webinar on project management. All the top five things you need to know. It's just gonna make you a really awesome project manager. On that note, thanks for watching. See you in the next video.