Foreword

I heard an amusing anecdote a number of years ago, about three frogs that had been relaxing for a while on a lily pad. Suddenly, with great excitement and enthusiasm, one turned to the other two and announced that, after much thought and consideration, he had decided to jump off the pad. His declaration was met with surprise, admiration, congratulations, best wishes for future success, and, if the truth be told, a not-inconsequential amount of envy. When a reasonable amount of time had passed, an observer looked around to determine how many frogs remained on the lily pad. Imagine his surprise when he saw the same three frogs! After a moment’s befuddlement, he understood what had happened: The frog had decided to jump off but had never actually jumped.

In The Project Management Coaching Workbook, Susanne Madsen helps you address the most essential requirement for improving your project management performance—transferring your knowledge of the skills, techniques, practices, and behaviors that can help you achieve superior project results into actions that you consistently take every day. She does this by sharing with you important guiding principles, such as:

It is your ability to help people embrace your vision, organize and coordinate their efforts, and sustain dynamic and productive interpersonal relationships—more than your use of graphs, charts, and procedures—that will lead you to project success.

To achieve outstanding results, you must encourage people to buy in and commit to achieving project success by meaningfully involving them at all points throughout the project.

She does this by introducing you to many and varied ways to develop, analyze, interpret, and present important project information that can provide improved clarity and understanding of your project’s intended results as well as how you propose to go about achieving them. Examples include how to frame the specific criteria that define whether project results meet or exceed project expectations and how to identify, organize, and engage the people who will determine what the project is to accomplish, who will be affected by the project outcomes, and who will perform the work to achieve results.

But most important, Susanne helps you improve your project management performance by guiding you through the following steps to create and implement a personalized plan for molding yourself into the project manager you want to be:

Developing a clear and specific picture of the values you want to live by, how you want to guide and treat the people with whom you work, how you want to approach your assignments, and what you feel will make each of your projects truly successful

Assessing through your own eyes, as well as through those of the people with whom you work, how your behaviors today compare with those to which you aspire in the future

Creating a plan to ensure you both continue to use those best practices you have already embraced and develop and adopt behaviors and actions you have not yet internalized

Continually assessing your progress in acquiring and using the skills, knowledge, and behaviors you seek to develop.

The information, guidance, and suggestions in this book are based on the belief that you must choose for yourself those behaviors on which you will ultimately rely to perform your project management tasks. Throughout the book, Susanne encourages you to clarify your personal vision of the project manager you ultimately want to become. This approach has the effect of gently helping you progress from understanding what project management success means to you to committing to do whatever it takes to accomplish it. Successfully making this transition is the key to ensuring that you will actually realize your vision.

In sum, The Project Management Coaching Workbook offers a unique blend of interpersonal and analytical tools, techniques, and behaviors. As you follow Susanne’s tips and guidance, she eases you off the lily pad and launches you on your journey to become the project manager you want to be.

—Stanley E. Portny, PMP,
author of Project Management For Dummies, Third Edition