Skills 7 – Project Manager – Australia's online resource for project management professionals

Controlling complex projects

Complexity theory helps us to understand the social behaviours of teams and the networks of people involved in and around a project, its stakeholders. Pat Weaver on why complexity is not just a synonym for complicated or large.

August 7, 2014

How technical project managers fail to communicate

Some smart people excel at explaining complicated content to nonspecialists, while others bomb. Frank J Pietrucha explains why getting technical isn’t always a smart move.

August 5, 2014

Communication

Sun Tzu and the art of stakeholder management

Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War nearly 2,500 years ago; his ideas have been widely translated and are regularly used as a guide for management thinking. But, asks Lynda Bourne, why go to war when you can instead learn to manage your stakeholders well?

July 22, 2014

Stakeholders

The role of action learning in project leadership

What are the advantages and what is the importance of action learning and reflective practice to improving project performance through leadership development? Alexandra Secerbegovic discusses the merits of these techniques.

July 16, 2014

Leadership

Choosing project team members

How do you choose members for a project team? Functional skills are no longer the only criteria; project managers must consider behaviour, writes PM Oracles.

June 26, 2014

Teamwork

Review: Reinventing Communication – Mark Phillips

This highly original book looks at two perennial issues faced by projects of all kinds, reviews Lynda Bourne: how to create an environment of high performance for the people working in it and how to manage project complexity.

June 17, 2014

Engaging virtual project teams

As workforces become more dispersed and remote, what does it take to manage a virtual project team effectively? Matthew Franceschini looks at the trend towards contract workers and how managers can deal with dispersed project teams.

June 11, 2014

Teamwork

The 3 types of stakeholder communication

Project success is determined by the attitudes of the key stakeholders around the project. Delivering a project on time, on budget and to specification is not sufficient. Lynda Bourne discusses the ways in which we should employ different types of communication for our projects.

May 28, 2014

Project management lessons from firefighting

Many of the tasks in the early stages of a project are spent establishing the chain of command, project procedures, roles and responsibilities and setting up the project for success. PM Oracles applies some lessons from firefighting to this process.

May 21, 2014