Everyday Project Management

Johanna Rothman, President of Rothman Consulting Group, Inc., and creator of the blog - http://jrothman.com/blog/mpd/, is the author of Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, and Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds Corrective Action for the Software Industry.  We recently interviewed Johanna about her views on blogs and PM. Here is that interview. Thank you Johanna. 

Hi Kristen,

Thank you!

What have you learned doing your blog?

• I’ve learned that while each project is unique, there are some common problems across all projects:

1. how to get started because the front end is often fuzzy
2. how to keep people on just one project, because of the perceived need for everyone to multitask
3. and how to know what done means so you can finish the project.

• I don’t know for sure I hope it’s helped people think about their work as project managers and how they organize their projects. If there was a recipe for projects, I would happily publish it. But there isn’t. The best we can do is use our brains and apply what we know to the situation, and if that’s not good enough to search for more help. I hope people think about and then use some of the pragmatic approaches I discuss on Managing Product Development.

Johanna

Pawel Brodzinski, creator of the blog - http://blog.brodzinski.com, has worked in quality assurance, software development, design, support, and implementation teams throughout is PM career. He lives in Krakow, Poland. We recently interviewed Pawel about his view on blogs and PM. Here is that interview. Thank you Pawel. 

Hello Kristen,

 it’s nice to hear you consider me as an influential blogger. 



What have you learned doing your blog?

• 

Consistency is the king. If you are consistent with whatever you do you at least keep momentum and gain fluency. I see a similar pattern in managing project and blogging (and with many others too). There’s time when you struggle just to get another thing done, no matter of that’s publishing another post or completing the next task from a schedule. It doesn’t always look like that – sometimes you aren’t overloaded and you’re able to work on general improvements, let it be implementing some new project management technique or tweaking blog layout. However, that works only when you are consistent all the time thus you got to the point where you’re able to push what you do to the next level.

 

How has your blog helped the field of pm?

• 

I hope so. My idea is to bring more of real life examples than to write about different methodologies or theories on project management. Sometimes it means going against the stream but still I believe this approach is valuable. Even when you don’t agree with something you can confront your opinions with a situation which actually happened. I neither pretend to have the best answers nor to have all of them and I’m always open for a discussion.



What do you like most about blogging?



• Two things. First, I’m able to talk with different people all over the world who share at least professional interests. Second, writing about any subject forces you to learn it constantly. Being part of a community and being able to learn from others experiences is a great thing.   



Besides yourself, who do you like in pm?

• 

I think the best answer would be redirecting you to a links section on my blog (http://blog.brodzinski.com). I try to keep their quality links only if you’re a software project manager all of them are must-reads. If you work in different area a couple of them will be probably less interesting.

 Regards, 
Pawel