Can you remember back to high school when you were at a football or baskeball game and the crowd was cheering on the home team to win, even if they were losing the game? Can’t you just hear the crowd cheering, “Let’s Go Team, Let’s Go Team, Let’s Go Team!”. In remembering the feeling and environment, I want you to think of how you can take the same enthusiasm and apply to your own team as a leader.
Team leader have the big job of keeping their team motivated to succeed in whatever they are working on. Whether it is in …read more

Calling all business owners to test your leadership strength. What I mean by this is…Are you an ideal leader example for your team? Or do you have areas that you need to cultivate in order to become an ideal leader? Whichever it is, I want you to take a journey with me to test your leadership muscle.
As business owners mostly know and understand, it is essential to the success of a business that you have good leadership skills. When you have a team of employees or contractors working for you, your leadership skills should be at a level where you …read more

Are you looking for a project management tool that will help you manage your projects, teams and technology? Then checkout LiquidPlanner to see how this software can help you get organized.
According to their website, organizing your project with LiquidPlanner means that you will be able to:

Project & Portfolio Views – View high-level overviews or task-level details of your project schedules in one easy-to-manage space.
Multi-level Organization – Create clients, projects, and tasklists so you can view, filter, and zoom in on tasks at any level of detail, no matter how complex the work.
Drag-and-Drop Prioritization – Change the order of scheduled tasks …read more

If you work with a virtual team then collaboration is an important component for your business. Having successful collaborations can either break or make a team’s ability to reach its goals. As a business owner who uses virtual team members, I have found thant collaborating is essential so that communications are always open for my team members.
The following things important to the collaboration process.

Initial meeting to explain all the details of the project.
A way to track the project’s progress. Each member needs to be able to report on their progress
Make sure accountability is in place for each member.
Support for the …read more

Another type of large project team can be termed as a “Foosball” team or a static team. For those who may not know, Foosball is, according to Webster.com, a table game resembling soccer in which the ball is moved by manipulating rods to which small figures of players are attached (also called table soccer). Two to four players can play at a time to win the game.
The thing about that connects a “Foosball” team to a project team is the fact that both can become static. In a sense, not moving or changing it’s strategy. Constantly doing the same thing can …read more

Team success is important and finding tools to help guide your team down the road to success is important. Knowing what success looks like can be a question that you may have on your mind. According to Webster.com, success is when you achieve a ” favorable or desired outcome”.
One of the ways that a project manager can help a team achieve a “favorable outcome” is through the use of encouraging words. A timely and correctly placed encouragement can help a team member or a project move towards success.
With this in mind, important saying about team success have been compiled from …read more

A connected project team allows its members to grow and help each other refine their skills. A disconnected project team could fracture and cause it’s members to lose their focus.
Ensuring that your project team is connected and growing is a very important tasks as a project manager. Being able to identify the key aspects of a connected and growing team can mean the difference between success and failure.
To help you identify the differenct between a connected and disconnected team, the list below was created. It can help you make sure that their project team stays connected and continues to grow.

Connected

Disconnected

Inter-team …read more

In a teaming environment for a large project, occasionally you may need to separate into sub-teams in order to complete a project. This is usually done to ensure that project deadlines and task are completed in a timely manner. While at the same time allowing projects to flow smoothly.
This article is the first in a series about organizing large project teams. Each of the articles will cover a particulr type of team along with the pros and cons of using each type of team.
Case Study 1: Circular Team
Being able to create smooth transitions between the sub-teams and the full project …read more

This is the final post in a series about virtual project management teams. Read the rest of the articles: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
As a project manager with almost 15 years of experience, one of the important things that I have learned is that project management tools are very important to the success of a project. I have used Microsoft Project, Zoho Project and tested many others but have found for my business that Zoho Projects is best to use (checkout the Software Review: Zoho Projects). I can integrate it with Zoho’s other products which makes managing …read more

Make sure that you check out the other articles in this series: Part 1 | Part 2
As a project manager, I have learned to deal with the hard lessons straight-on so that I could learn from them. Some of the hard lessons that I’ve learned have been…

Hiring the wrong person for me team. If this type of problem is allowed to linger, it could cause major problems on your team and stress on you as a project manager. Solved this problem by either working with the person and helping them improve and synergize with the team or replacing the person …read more