Leadership Skills : Trust

Trust is a key leadership skill.  Without trust, you will find many blockers in your projects and find that teams will not optimally perform for you within the execution phase of your project.  Gaining trust from your senior stakeholders ensures that your project has the appropriate level of support from the business and provides you with a level of authorisation to  smooth out any political issues.

Scope

This first item on the Project Manager's agenda when commencing a project is usually to define the scope.  In many corporations either a Project Charter or a PID is created and approved before the project is authorised.  This single document contains the scope of the project and the business justification.  Importantly, this document authorises the project to go ahead and confirms the name of the Project Manager.

The scope document is often referred to throughout the life cycle of the project and is used by all stakeholders to confirm the direction of the project.  Where the Initiation document provides an outline of the scope, a further breakdown and detail must be confirmed.

My current project is having difficulty defining the scope.  Some of this is due to budget reasons and some of it is down to communication issues.  My current client is a Japanese bank.  The communication issue is not just the language, but the culture.  I have previously written an article relating to the culture of a Japanese corporation.

Building The team

Building a team is one of the most important aspects of being a good of a Project Manager. When the project is under pressure to deliver, you have to rely on your team to put in the extra effort in a short amount of time, under constraints and under a close eye of your Project Board and Sponsor.

Just this week, I have had to deliver the Project Plan and budgets to the company PMO to gain authorisation to continue with the project.  I am at the end of the Planning phase and this means that the conceptual design, plan for the project, migration, strategy and operations, along with many other documents, have had to be delivered.  Most of these have been discussed in detail, but not put to paper, so I needed my team to deliver.