Project Management Fundamentals
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 08/11/2024
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Leadership is a swamp. Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Bad service is a brand killer. This is a controversial piece today, because I am singling out one race, one group in isolation. It is also a total generalisation and there will be exceptions where what I am saying is absolute rubbish. There will be other races and groups, who are equally guilty as well, who I am not singling out or covering, so I am demonstrating a blatant and singular bias. I know all that, but let the hellfire rain down on my head, I am just sick of some of this lousy service here in Tokyo. It is a mystery to me how the service in some Chinese restaurants...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Public speaking takes no prisoners. I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events. I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago. This is a daunting task. Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying. The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design. Being an inspirational speech, it adds that...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Being the leader is no fun anymore. In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero-sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Sales is a nightmare. It is usually a solitary life. You head off to meet customers all day. Your occasional return to the office is to restock materials or complete some processes you can’t do on-line. Japan is a bit different. Here it is very common to see two salespeople going off to meet the client. If you are selling to a buyer, it is also common to face more than one person. This is a country of on-the-job training and consensus decision making, so the numbers involved automatically inflate. Even in Western style operations, there is more of a...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Japan doesn’t love crazy. In our High Impact Presentations Course we have exercises where we ask the participants to really let go of all their inhibitions and let it all hang out – and “go crazy, go over the top”. This is challenging in Japan. Normally, we are all usually very constrained when we speak in society. Our voices are very moderate, our body language is quite muted and our gestures are rather restrained. Unfortunately, this often carries over into our public presentations. Without realising it, we find ourselves speaking in this dreadful monotone, putting...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Team building is fraught. Actually, when do we create teams? Usually we inherit teams from other people, stocked with their selections and built around their preferences, aspirations and prejudices, not ours. In rare cases, we might get to start something new and we get to choose who joins. Does that mean that “team building” only applies when we start a new team? If that were the case, then most of us would never experience building a team in our careers. This concept is too narrow. In reality, we are building our teams every day, regardless of whether we suddenly became their leader or...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Salespeople often miss the point. They are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome. Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company. The product or service lines are expanded or updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme. No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec. These discussions, however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring. ...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Q&A can destroy your personal brand. Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control. You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good. However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight. Why a street fight? Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules. “Oh, that’s not right” you might be thinking. “What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on...
info_outlineThe Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Staff can be a nightmare. Teams are composed of the most difficult material ever created - people. That requires many capabilities, but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often seriously deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars: category experts; best salesperson, long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing at the end of the...
info_outlineProjects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them. It isn’t usually that we don’t know what to do, it is that we don’t actually do it. We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails, without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved. We see this tendency all the time. Any group of people given a project task go straight into the gruesome detail. In project planning, a pinch of planning goes an extremely long way. Having a common and clear set of rules helps to ensure we are all approaching the project in the same vein.
Here are ten rules for ensuring that what needs to get done is completed on time and to expectations.
- Mind our business. Keep our eye on the ball, especially defining what is inside and outside the project scope. This often changes mid-steam so we need to be nimble and adjust accordingly.
- Know the customer’s requirements. Double check you have properly understood the detail, document it and keep checking against that documented record, especially if there are changes needed.
- Plan well. The plan will cover the scope, schedule, cost, approach etc. Involve task owners to gain buy-in and apply a strong reality check to what you have created. Strangely, the planning value comes from the creation process and not just the project outcome. It forces some hard thinking, tough prioritisations, player commitments, clear controls, smooth coordination and cooperation. Basically, the things at which most companies are usually rubbish.
- Build a great team with strong ownership. Motivation of the team is critical, so we need total clarity around the WHY, trust, communication, sufficient resources and mutually agreed deadlines.
- Track progress. Frequent reviews, wide visibility, broad communication and clear goals are needed. There are hard and soft aspects to most projects, so ensure we don’t overlook the soft skills needed to succeed.
- Use baseline controls. These are the fundamental building blocks against which we steer the project forward and against which we alter course when needed.
- Write it, share it, save it. Here is the Holy Grail of project management – write it down - if it isn’t written down it doesn’t exist. Document procedures, plans, evolving designs. Baseline controls are compared against the preserved records. Repeatable projects especially need this record, to which are added the fresh set of insights and learnings of the current project.
- Test it. Jumping into new territories with both feet can be high risk. Better to develop test cases early to help with understanding and verification of what is required to succeed. Resources and time are the most often underestimated elements, so an early testing helps to flush out the gaps.
- Ensure customer satisfaction. Make the customer’s real needs the prism through which everything is viewed. Undetected changes in customer requirements or not focusing on the customer’s business needs can in fact blow up in our face.
- Be pro-active. Be proactive in applying these principles and in identifying and solving problems as they arise. Review and search for problems, knowing there are people dedicated to hiding issues. Vigilance is a virtue we all need to practice when working on projects, especially anticipating trouble before it arises or becomes too explosive.
- Stop the same old, same old and take a fresh look at your methodology for approaching projects. It seems so simple, but it can simply go wrong so easily. You might be surprised at how loose and inefficient your current methodology is. We can always do better and these ten rules will help us on that journey.