How to Develop your IT “High Potentials”

A few years ago, in 2012 Kim Stevenson, CIO of Intel, had a revelation: “IT executives are leaders just like any other function, and conventional leadership development competencies apply, but there is something so unique about the way technology transforms the business that we need to give our IT leaders something more.”

That thought prompted Stevenson to create Intel IT GeMs, which is shorthand for those in the Intel IT department who have GM (aka “General Manager”) potential. GeMs is a leadership program where Stevenson and several of her senior staff meet face-to-face with prospective leaders for one or two full days, five or six times during an 18 month period. “This is a chance for me to get to know my senior team, which is helpful to my coaching them outside of the GeMs program,” Stevenson says.

Four Areas of Concentration

One of the major concepts that Stevenson promotes during the program is that IT roles generally fall into four areas with an emphasis on either development or operations.  “You are either in application development or application support or you are in infrastructure engineering or infrastructure support,” says Stevenson. “IT leaders must have depth in one of these areas, and awareness of the other three. You cannot have awareness in all but depth in none; nor can you have depth in some while lacking awareness in others,” she says.

During the GeMs program, Stevenson encourages her team to think about those four buckets and where their passion is. “If you have a passion for application development, then spend time in infrastructure engineering so you gain that awareness,” she says.  “This discussion starts to shape the kind of experiences they will seek over the next few years.”

Five Attributes of IT Leadership

The rest of the curriculum is organized around the five attributes that Stevenson believes her team needs to achieve to become effective IT leaders. These are:

1. Broad perspective: “As an IT leader, you need a very broad perspective about the market, the journey your company is on, and who your customers are,” she says.  “The challenge is to take that perspective and turn it into knowledge your company can act on.”  People lower in the organization lack a broad perspective on corporate strategy, “So you have to become an outstanding translation engine and translate your perspective into knowledge that they can use.” But translation to your team is not enough.  “You also need to take the knowledge your team possesses and translate it back up to the CEO,” says Stevenson.  “If you don’t develop the ability to translate perspective into actionable knowledge in all directions, you just slide along and become a coordinator, adding little value.”

2. Company first: A Patrick Lencioni fan, Stevenson borrows from his concept of “company first” in her leadership program.  “The team you are on is more important than the team you lead,” she tells her senior leaders. “In every IT transformation, you make major tradeoffs between current and future functionality, and you have to be able to let the company’s needs drive your decisions around strategy, investment, and the sequencing of change. It’s company first, your organization second, and you as a leader third.”

Stevenson cites budget management as a classic example of when “company first” should come into play.  A few years ago, she and her executive peers saw that data science was a big area for Intel, a function that would add a lot of value for the company. But IT had a deficit of data scientists and algorithm experts, so Stevenson decided to invest in that talent and fund 80 new resources. “That meant I had to take resources away in another area,” she says. “I had to say, ‘you need to reduce your teams, while at the same time, we are going to hire 80 people out of the market.’”  Stevenson’s bet paid off as data science drove an additional $350M in value to Intel over the next three years, a result of her prioritizing Intel over the needs of one particular team.

Likewise, after years of investing in Intel’s supply chain, the company saw its ranking in supply chain excellence rise dramatically, an achievement of which Intel was particularly proud. “But when I looked at how our product roadmaps where changing, and how our customer base was expanding, I knew we needed a sales force transformation,” says Stevenson. “But where would I get the money?”  She told the supply chain team that moving from #5 to #4 in supply chain would not create as much Intel value as a sales force transformation, and that she would be moving some supply chain budget to sales.  “The supply chain team was shocked at first, but then became willing participants,” she says.  “I am proud of them because they saw the value of the decision. They are Intel first and supply chain team second.”

3. Systems thinking: “The world is a system with patterns and engagement points, and you as a leader must recognize those patterns first,” says Stevenson. “Identifying patterns is where we create competitive advantage.”  While one could certainly look for patterns in business processes and sales data to create value, Stevenson illustrates systems thinking with a talent acquisition challenge.

“At Intel, we are changing our products and that means we need new skills, for example radio frequency and machine learning,” she says.  “What universities do these people attend? Are we recruiting from the right places?  Where does the talent want to live?  What attracts them to that place? We are trying to figure out the patterns so that we can be successful in hiring the best talent for our future needs.  We have intuitive knowledge about hiring great manufacturing people from the Midwest. But we don’t necessarily have that with these newer skills. We have to uncover the patterns.”

4. Change agent: “By its nature, IT drives transformation and as an IT leader, transformation must be a part of your DNA.” says Stevenson. “Do you have a large capacity for change?  Can you handle unexpected events? As CIO, you are in a constant state of transformation and must be good at leading during periods of ambiguity.” 

For example, several years ago, social media was gaining traction among consumers, but most corporations had not yet embraced it. “I believe IT professionals should be early adopters of new technologies and services, and as the CIO I needed to role model the way,” says Stevenson who had had a Twitter account for a number of years, but wasn’t actively tweeting at the time. “I first got active and then encouraged my direct reports to get engaged on Twitter and LinkedIn.” This led Intel IT to evolve the company’s internal social platform to better facilitate collaboration. “Intel employees now use our internal social platforms to share documents, plan, or to find and share information, which improves their productivity.” Intel IT also worked with the marketing group to revise the company’s external social strategy, building a real-time dashboard and market sensing platform. “In one year, we went from having a minimal social presence to millions of fans on Facebook, and the Intel brand has been on the rise since that time.” Intel recently moved up 30 spots in BrandZ’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands.

5. Courage:  For Stevenson, all of the other competencies lead up to this: “As CIO, you are the first to step into traffic, to stand alone during a period of change before people come on board.  That takes personal courage.”

Stevenson remembers when, a few years ago, she wanted her technology leaders to “broaden their aperture” in thinking about new technologies, so she pronounced to her entire organization that Intel’s current IT platforms were “dead.”  “Here I was in front of 350 people and our technical experts, who know far more about technology platforms than I do, were coming up to the microphone in protest. My goal was to create enough shock to broaden their thinking, so I had to stand there alone as they threw arrows.” Now, Intel runs a much more diverse portfolio of technologies, which was Stevenson’s goal.  “People are always reminding me that our current platforms are not actually dead, and I say, ‘Yes, that wasn’t the point.’”

The Elements of Good Leadership

There is no magic formula for successful leadership, says Deborah Ancona, director of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Instead, each leader needs to figure out his or her own unique leadership signature — one that draws on his or her own strengths.

What does it take to be an effective leader in today’s unpredictable and uncertain business environments?

Earlier this month, I attended an MIT Sloan executive education course called “Transforming Your Leadership Strategy,” taught by MIT Sloan professor Deborah Ancona. While a good deal of the learning in the course took place through interactive exercises, Ancona conveyed many important points about effective leadership through her presentations. Here are a few of those points:

• Leadership is personal. There is no magic formula for successful leadership, Ancona explained — and no one-size-fits-all best practices, either. Instead, each leader needs to answer the question: “What is the best way for me to lead?” Each person needs to figure out his or her own unique leadership signature — one that draws on his or her own strengths. While charismatic leaders are particularly memorable, there are many other ways to be an effective leader, Ancona pointed out.
• That said, leadership involves four overarching capabilities.Ancona teaches a leadership framework developed at MIT that involves four key capabilities: sensemaking (in other words, making sense of the business environment in which your company operates);visioning; relating to others; and inventing new ways to get things done. In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article called “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader,” Ancona and colleagues Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski and Peter Senge wrote that leaders often excel in one or two of the four capabilities — but no leader is equally strong in all four areas. As a result, leaders should search for others who can complement them.
• Today’s leaders need the ability to make sense of complex environments.Sensemaking — the ability to make sense of what’s going on in a changing and complex environment — is a particularly important predictor of leadership effectiveness right now, Ancona explained. Sensemaking in business (a term drawn from the works of Karl Weick) requires executives to let go of their old mental models and some of their core assumptions; to take in data from a wide variety of sources; to use the information they have to construct, with others, a “map” of what they think is going on; and to verify and update the map — in part by conducting small experiments that provide the organization with more information.
• Leadership is not a solo act. It is no longer possible for companies to thrive with great leadership only at the top, Ancona said. Instead, companies need what she calls distributed leadership — with people at a variety of levels in the organization exercising the four key leadership capabilities skillfully

How to Close a Meeting: Four ways to Create Buy-in, Get Results

Here’s how to close a meeting to create buy-in, inspire action, and align participants:

1. Restate the Goals. The best meetings I’ve ever attended gave me a feeling of contribution and accomplishment. Most often these feelings occurred when the leader started the meeting by clearly stating what we’d have when we would walk out of the room—in other words, the goal(s) of our time together. 

They could range from a specific decision, a list of ideas, an action plan, or even a documented process.  And then that same meeting leader would end the meeting by saying, “When we walked into this room, we agreed to this goal: _________________ , and here’s what we’ve accomplished: ________________.”

That’s the secret sauce: Giving the participants credit for reaching the goals together.

2. Confirm Next Steps & Owners. Have you ever left a meeting unsure of what was happening next and who was going to do it?  Me too. That’s why I always feel appreciation for meeting leaders who recap the action steps and assignments. 

It can be done with tact and respect, by saying something as simple as, “To ensure we’re on the same page, here’s what I heard: Tina is going to research sales leads for us and email them out to this team by Friday. Michael is going to draft a targeted marketing plan and provide it to us prior to our next meeting one week from today.  And I will schedule our next meeting to review the plan on Tuesday at 2:00 PM.  What have I missed?”

Then give them time to surface any other actions that must be taken to make the plan a success.

3. Thank the Participants. I’m intentional about the word “participants” instead of “attendees.” That’s because a well-led (and, therefore, well-closed) meeting is one in which everyone contributes. It’s active, not passive.

That means asking for input through open-ended questions, listening as much as talking, and inviting the participants to challenge your ideas. When all that happens, you get to benefit from the wisdom in the room, and that creates buy-in and fosters a culture of feedback.

As you close, thank them for their contributions.

4. Bonus – Use Humor and End Early. Who doesn’t like to laugh? And who doesn’t like to get some time back in an already-jam-packed schedule? You’ll build rapport and draw your participants back if they know you’ll honor their time and include a bit of fun in your meetings.

The first couple of times you try these new techniques, they may feel a bit strange. But stick with it—you’ll be a meeting guru in no time.

Managers in the Digital Age Need to Stay Human

The technological advances of the digital age have allowed the global workforce to be better connected, more collaborative, and have greater personal impact than ever before. More information is immediately available, through more channels, than at any time in history. Clearly, workplaces are now optimized for high levels of workforce engagement. Or are they?

More than a year after its publication, I’m still reeling from the results of Gallup’s 2013 Global Workforce Study. Only 13% of people in 142 countries reported they were engaged in their work, while nearly a quarter reported they were “actively disengaged.”

The theme of the 7th Annual Global Drucker Forum is Claiming Our Humanity: Managing in the Digital Age. The first step in claiming our humanity is creating workplaces that optimize human engagement. Creating these workplaces starts with leading people differently. Here are four observations about managing engagement in the digital age.

1. Managing engagement requires new leadership skills.

The question of how to motivate people in organizations has been of interest to scholars and practitioners since the time of Frederick Taylor. However, the rise of the global economy and the coming of the digital age have made the engagement question much more complex. Organizations everywhere are coping with unprecedented levels of competition and pressure to perform. These organizations are facing a legion of issues that include the need to become more global, the need to simultaneously become more frugal and more innovative, the need to manage new and different stakeholders, and the need to cope with political uncertainty, energy issues, and other factors over which they have no control. For many organizations, the search for competitive advantage is focused on maximizing human performance — and the question of how to create and sustain a highly engaged workforce is taking on new meaning and urgency.

A hundred years ago, managing employee engagement was a much more stable proposition. Changes affecting the workplace occurred — but at a much slower pace. Today, literally everything in the workplace is changing from the volume and complexity of job-related data to the nature of work itself. In the digital age, managing engagement occurs in an environment of nearly continuous change. New leadership skills are required.

As part of our research for the book Choosing Change, we interviewed 60 executives from 13 global organizations. Each of their organizations had recently navigated some form of organizational change — in some cases, disruptive change. In the interviews, executives gave specific advice to leaders for managing engagement during periods of “high change.”

Put yourself “in the middle.” Leaders should position themselves between the chaos of change and their people. Engaging leaders use their experience, insight, and knowledge of the organization’s business and culture to help people make sense of changes and to better participate in them.

Invest in your people. Leaders should personally invest more effort in talent development during periods of high change. By doing this, engaging leaders use change as a medium for accelerating the professional development of the workforce.

Focus on a higher purpose. In times of uncertainty, engaging leaders use higher purpose to keep people focused on their ability to shape the future of the organization.

Leave no one behind. “False urgency” is a phrase we use to describe a phenomenon sometimes mentioned by the executives. False urgency occurs when change anxiety becomes so high that fear takes over and the only thing that matters is staying on schedule. Suddenly, there is “just no time” for things like human development and engagement, and the workforce is left behind. Engaging leaders refuse false urgency and stay focused on people when the stakes are highest.

The executives reported that when they followed the above actions, people were able to stay more positive, focused, and engaged during periods of change. An event that was perceived as a personal threat was reframed as an opportunity for personal development — and to shape the future of the organization.

2. Managing engagement starts on the front lines.

Until recently, much emphasis has been placed on the C-suite’s role in improving engagement. However, a growing amount of data from Gallup, Bain & Company, the Wall Street Journal, McKinsey, and others is indicating that supervisors play a key role in workforce engagement. In fact, a recent study by Gallup found that they account for up to 70% of the variance on engagement.

However, in spite of growing evidence of the importance of supervisors in workforce engagement, organizations have been slow to implement changes in how supervisors are developed. In my experience, leadership development activities for first line supervisors are often more transactional than transformational. By this I mean that supervisor development focuses more on building technical skills than on building the higher level capabilities needed to motivate and engage people. Said simply, many current leadership development programs do not adequately prepare supervisors to create work environments optimized for engagement. It may be time to take a careful look at the curriculum your organization uses to train supervisors.

Senior leadership is also critically important in building workforce engagement in myriad ways. For example, their support in re-creating the role of supervisor is critical. Perhaps even more important is their role in creating, reinforcing, and modelling an organization-wide culture of engagement.

3. Managing engagement is personal.

Last month, I attended ATD’s global conference in Orlando, Fla., along with almost 11,000 talent development professionals from 100 countries. Speaking to people from five continents about engagement, I noticed that they quickly associated their level of engagement with the performance of their supervisor. When people told me they were dissatisfied with their supervisor, the dissatisfaction seldom related to poor technical or business skills. Instead, it related to supervisors’ poor personal skills and their inability, or unwillingness, to invest energy in the people on their team.

When I asked people at the ATD conference to describe a great supervisor, they often described the ability to do two things: Perform the technical aspects of the job and personally invest in getting to know them better and investing in their development.

The information I gained at ATD is consistent with the findings of another recent study by Gallup. In that study, Gallup found that workforce engagement was higher when managers 1) have some form of daily communication with their employees, 2) make a concerted effort to “get to know” their employees and help them feel comfortable talking about any subject, and 3) personally help employees develop in their jobs. Clearly, a key ingredient in highly engaged workplaces is leaders who are personally involved with people.

4. Managing engagement is about everyone.

About a century ago, the great Mary Parker Follett wrote a classic article entitled “The Essentials of Leadership.” While it’s rich for many reasons, I like it because it acknowledges the critical role of the follower in organizational life. The idea of “followership” elevates the role of people in organizations by suggesting that everyone has both leadership power and responsibility. Everyone is responsible for leading themselves — and for being a fully contributing member of their team. To Follett, followership was active and important. It completed the equation that is leadership.

So, for teams to become more engaged, they need to have more than engaging leaders—they also need engaging members. We each have the responsibility to our organization, our team, and ourselves to “self-engage.” Earlier, I suggested that many of today’s leadership development programs do not develop engaging supervisors. Likewise, today’s programs don’t develop — or even acknowledge — the role of followership. A key way to create engaging workplaces is to define and develop followership as a formal part of leadership development.

The digital age can enable us to do more than merely claim our humanity: It can foster a renaissance for human achievement in organizations. A great first step is creating workplaces optimized for workforce engagement.

The Top Complaints from Employees About Their Leaders Lou Solomon

If you’re the kind of boss who fails to make genuine connections with your direct reports, take heed: 91% of employees say communication issues can drag executives down, according to results from our new Interact/Harris Poll, which was conducted online with roughly 1,000 U.S. workers.

In the survey, employees called out the kind of management offenses that point to a striking lack of emotional intelligence among business leaders, including micromanaging, bullying, narcissism, indecisiveness, and more. In rank order, the following were the top communication issues people said were preventing business leaders from being effective:

The data shows that the vast majority of leaders are not engaging in crucial moments that could help employees see them as trustworthy. This is startling, considering how much money organizations spend conducting employee surveys and reorganizations, engaging consultants and implementing change initiatives.

Effective leaders know that healthy communication requires the energy of connection — with inclusion, recognition, clear directions, meaningful interaction and feedback as the nerve center of the company.

They know productivity is tied to communication. They are intentional about building a sense of connectedness with their teams and appreciation of their employees by saying and asking things such as:

#EffectiveLeaders use personal story telling instead of technical, scripted language.

1. Here’s what I appreciate about you and your contribution… A basic “atta-boy” or “atta-girl” doesn’t satisfy people who put their heart and soul into their work. Instead, say something specific to your employees like, “I appreciate the way you pull in people from other departments to reach your team goals — you’re a connector.”  Leaders need to notice employees’ unique, specific contributions, and let them know that you notice.

2. Thank you (personal and public). Daily interactions – from the elevator to the parking lot — represent opportunities for leaders to engage in dynamic interactions and show appreciation for their employees’ efforts. Public recognition at a staff meeting, or a thoughtful “thank you” in a newsletter or e-mail, are also meaningful.  For example, Duke Energy CEO Lynn Goodleaves “thank you” notes on yellow sticky notes in employees’ offices.

3. What do you think? Employees will withhold their best ideas from leaders who always have the “right” answer, or take credit for others’ ideas. Leaders need to proactively ask their employees: “How do you think we could improve?” “What is keeping us stuck?” and “What do you love about the work that we’re doing here?” Establish a safe environment in which people have the opportunity to express themselves and be recognized for their ideas.

4. Here’s what’s happening and what you can expect… Companies operate in a constant state of change and all too often, information is withheld from team members until the last minute. This is a huge distraction for employees, who need “real speak” about their futures to be present in their work. Leaders often underestimate employees’ ability to accept “why” if it is shared in an honest way. Leaders will gain deep respect when they share as much as they know as soon as they can share it. Real explanations are always better than no explanations.

5. I have some feedback for you… Don’t wait for a performance review to tell people how they’re doing. A culture of continual feedback is healthy and nimble. In particular, Millennials want more coaching and feedback than previous generations.

6. Let me tell you about something I learned the hard way… Smart, capable leaders who know their stuff are well respected, but employees like and trust leaders who are not only smart, but can occasionally lean back and laugh at their own mistakes, and who are generous with what life has taught them. Don’t be afraid to show that you’re human, too.
7. #EffectiveLeaders say, “Let me share a time I got it wrong” to develop #trust and respect.
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7. Hello, Susan…Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Get to know your employees by name. If the company is too big to know everyone’s name, start with the people in close proximity. There’s no excuse for saying “I’m not good with names.” The best among us work at it. Learn the art of association.

Vision that is too heavily weighted toward achievement at the expense of employee experience can exact a toll. Dr. Edward Hallowell, M.D., author and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, asserts that for most people, the two most powerful experiences in life are achieving and connecting. But if we focus only on achieving, we’re not doing well at connecting. Connection is a mindset and an energy exchange between people who are paying attention to one another. I often ask my MBA students this question: Who will influence you more and motivate you toward you best — the brilliant and well-published professor who has no time to connect, or the brilliant but less-well published professor who makes a connection with you as a human being? Hands down, it is always the latter.

What is all boils down to is that business is about people — it always has been, and always will be. Too often, businesses fall short not because leaders don’t understand the business, but because they don’t understand what the people who work for them need in order to bring their best effort to work.

Much of a team’s success lies in the pattern of connection a leader has with direct reports, and the way he or she empowers them to extend that pattern to his or her direct reports, and so on. In a business environment that is woefully lacking in employee commitment, leaders who aren’t actively connecting with people are themselves a liability.

15 Ways to Screw Up an IT Project

Paul Simon famously sang that there must be 50 ways to leave your lover. Similar could be said (if not sung) regarding projects: There must be 50 ways to screw up your IT projects. Indeed, ask IT executives and project management experts, as CIO.com did, and they will rattle off dozens of reasons why projects go astray. For the sake of brevity, however, we are starting with the top 15 ways to derail a project--and how to avoid these project management pitfalls.

1. Having a poor or no statement of work. "I've seen many projects encounter troubles due to the lack of a well-defined project scope," says Bryan Fangman, senior project manager at Borland, a Micro Focus Company.

"Despite the best planning efforts, change is inevitable, so having a clear statement of work up front is essential in getting agreement with the customer on what will actually be accomplished," Fangman says. "A poorly constructed statement of work (or absence of one) will lead to ambiguities that are hard to resolve and you will never truly know when the project is finished," he adds.

2. Not setting expectations up front. One of the key ways to screw up a project is to not create a roadmap and define project requirements and expectations for all stakeholders at the beginning of the project.

That's why "before we start any projects, I make sure that everyone on both the customer team and project team have a clear, documented understanding of two primary things: What we are going to do, and how we know when we are done," says Tim Garcia, CEO, Apptricity, which provides service-oriented architecture (SOA) for asset management enterprise resource planning (ERP). "Without documented agreement on the answers to these two questions, the project is in danger from the start."

3. Not securing management buy-in. "Executing a project without securing sponsor support is not only counter-productive but also a recipe for disaster," says Brad Clark, COO at Daptiv, a provider of on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions. "It's imperative to be on the same page with the sponsor for a project to move in the desired direction and get organizational buy-in."

4. Using the same methodology for all size projects. "Most project management methodologies have a standard set of key tasks and deliverables for enterprise IT projects," says Robert Longley, a consultant at Intuaction, a coaching and consulting company.

"Most methodologies are designed around projects of a certain size (i.e., $1 million plus)." Longley says. "If you have a project that is $100,000 and you try to use the standard approach, you may find that it costs more to do the deliverables than it does to do the actual project."

[Slideshow: 16 Steps to Surefire IT Project Success]

5. Overloading team members. "Your team members are not machines," says Dan Schoenbaum, the CEO of Teambox, a cloud-based collaboration and project management company. "Pay attention to how much work each individual member is assigned," he says. "If one member is overloaded, the end product will suffer. Utilize the strengths of your team and spread out the workload as much as possible. This will avoid overwhelming your team."

6. Waiting or not wanting to share information. "Waterfall approaches to project delivery--where results are not presented to users and stakeholders until late in the project--introduce risk and often lead to disappointing results," says Garcia.

That's because "users often don't know what they want until they can actually see, touch and work with it," Garcia says. That's why he recommends using an agile, iterative approach to project management. "Iterative projects delivers results in short, quick phases, with the most critical and complex components delivered first."

[Related: Why Your Next Big IT Project is Doomed]

7. Not having a clearly defined decision-making process."While user involvement and feedback are critical, successful projects also need a clear and defined decision-making process," says Garcia. "Project teams should embrace change, but change decisions need authoritative approval, agreement and documentation. Understanding the process and chain of command keeps everyone reading from the same playbook."

8. Not using a project management software system. "Excel spreadsheets relegate project managers to manual intervention and worst of all, 'walk the floor' status updating," says Brian Ahearn, CEO, evolphin Software, the developer of digital asset management software.

[Related: 7 Tips to Help Project Managers Track Their Tech Teams]

"Project managers need a solution that automatically updates project status each time a task is completed, alerts you when a task is past it's due date and will provide a complete and up to date project status report," he says. "The best tools free the project manager from the tyranny of manual reporting and allow them more time to drive critical tasks."

9. Allowing scope creep (or excessive scope creep). "Loosely defined and unclear project scope, halfway surprises and frequent change requests can lead to increased timelines, increased cost, escalations, a demotivated team and, most importantly, an unsatisfied customer," says Sandeep Anand, vice president of Project Governance at Nagarro, a high-end software development firm.

To combat scope creep, "ensure project objectives are understood, deliverables are defined and the project is monitored daily," Anand says. That said, change requests are a fact of life in projects. So it is a good idea to "budget for scope creep and have a defined process for accommodating change requests."

10. Being afraid to say "no." Part of being a good project manager is being "an educated advisor," says Markus Remark, vice president, Customer Operations, TOA Technologies, a provider of field service management software and solutions.

[Related: Time and Distance Enemies of Agile Project Management]

"This means knowing when to say 'no' to a request, whether because it's not in the best interest of the company, the project, the end-users or the customers," Remark says. "Knowing how to say no and offering a constructive alternative solution" can prevent a project from becoming derailed or delayed.

11. Not being a team player. "Every project has a team that is expected to work together to successfully complete the work," says Hilary Atkinson, director of Project Management at Force 3, a business solutions provider.

"The project manager is the hub of the team, the process and the solution. Yet many young or new project managers make decisions without consulting with the team and without gaining approval," Atkinson says. "Without that communication and approvals, the project is headed for disaster. The project manager cannot manage a project schedule, budget or scope without the team."

A related danger is that "the project becomes 'our project' rather than a 'company project,'" warns Gordon Veniard, a veteran management consultant and the owner of thevenworks.com. And "instead of focusing on achieving the goal or getting it right, [team members or whole teams] then spend time looking for others to blame, defending their own position or refusing to co-operate with other teams," he says.

"It's like a non-performing sports team where the defense blames the offense; the offense then blames the defense; and the coach berates the referee. They've temporarily forgotten about winning," Veniard says,

12. Poor communication. "One of the primary responsibilities of the project manager is to communicate," says Atkinson. "Communication keeps everyone on the team up to date with the current status, next steps and any issues."

However, "too many times projects managers feel they are too busy managing day-to-day tasks to take the time to communicate," Atkinson says. "This is a critical mistake and often the demise of a project. If the PM does not send out the meeting minutes, status reports and follow-up emails, he is increasing the risk for delays, risk for conflict and project failure."

13. Too many, too long status meetings. "Nothing sucks the life out of a team more than a status meeting," says Liz Pearce, the CEO of LiquidPlanner, an online project management provider. "Sure, there's some important information in there, but all too often the same information could have easily been shared through a collaborative system," she says.

Her advice: "Reserve team meetings for decision-making. For instance, Agile teams have daily 'stand-ups' which are useful in quickly identifying and removing obstacles," she says. At Liquid Planner, they've developed a happy medium: twice weekly triage meetings, "where we review any new work that's come in, assign owners and refocus the team on high priority tasks. It's a way to processing our collective 'inbox' and stay on track with deliverables."

14. Not caring about quality--the "good enough" syndrome."Due to different factors, such as schedule or budget pressure, it might be tempting to reduce the effort on quality assurance (QA)," says Sergio Loewenberg, senior manager, Business Consulting, Neoris, a global business and IT consulting company. However, a "lack of proper QA will result in a weak end product," he says.

"If the quality standards drop, the project will experience negative consequences such as re-work, liability and reduced margins," Loewenberg says. So the project management team needs to understand "that the cost of preventing errors is lower than the cost of fixing them."

15. Not learning from past project management mistakes."In every completed project plan there is a wealth of intelligence that rarely gets mined," notes Pearce. "Why did our project ship date slip by a month? How comprehensive were our initial specifications? How accurate was our team at estimating their tasks? A key benefit of using a project management tool is the ability to access the data that can provide answers to these questions," she says. "If a team is committed to self-improvement, they'll reap significant rewards by spending a few hours conducting post-project analysis."