In our closing keynote from the PMO Conference in 2021, we welcome Ian Leslie, author of acclaimed books on human behaviour, described by Malcolm Gladwell as “one of my favourite writers”. Ian’s latest book, Conflicted, is about the power of productive disagreement.
Working within a PMO, supporting portfolios, programmes and projects, our work thrives on interactions with peers, managers, senior executives, customers and a wide range of stakeholders. None of us will be unfamiliar with conflict in our daily working lives, projects by their very nature are all about solving problems, working at a fast pace, dealing with dependencies, agendas and internal politics – all hotbed areas for disagreements.
In this session, Ian finished our day with a thought-provoking, different perspective on disagreements in the workplace – and how we can all benefit from productive conflict.
The book itself features fascinating stories from the Beatles, the Wright Brothers, Ku Klux Klan, Socrates and hostage negotiators - quite the mix!
If there is one thing we can expect from working in project management it's conflict.
Due to the nature of projects - working to provide a solution to something we've probably never done before will mean there are problems to solve; people to bring onside; teams to work together and any number of expectations to be met. Believe it or not, some conflict is good and helps us uncover answers to problems that enable the project to move on and be delivered successfully.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to cover several different frameworks, approaches and techniques that the modern project practitioner can utilise in their day-to-day work that make a difference to people and their performance levels.
We also share ten different things your PMO can be thinking about to make a real difference to the performance of your PMO. We're going to look at the following areas:
servant leadership;
facilitation,
coaching and;
conflict management.
In this second article of our PMOs Supporting Modern Project Management series, we take a look at conflict management.
Portfolio management - a simple process? Perhaps you're shaking your head at that but what if we said that intrinsically those portfolio management processes are simple - it's just when people get involved that it becomes complicated.
In this session we were joined by Lucy Loh, a consultant focused on organisation diagnosis, design and development, business architecture, strategy development, and organisational change using systems approaches. She's also co-author on a book on a systemic approach to business strategy - Patterns of Strategy (we like this one!)
In this session, we looked at the 13 different ways that the portfolio management process gets derailed - what the PMO crew thought about that and how to deal with them
