Yesterday I had a very interesting brief discussion with PMOT (project managers on Twitter), we were discussing how a lot of people are shifting their careers to project management and how some people who are not qualified to be project managers are really distorting the image of good ones, some PMOT said that most of today’s PMs are average ones and others found no issue at all, for me I have different view point, in this post I will reply to the discussion that we had on Twitter.

A quote can summarize a whole life experience and can convey a great deal of knowledge and wisdom to the world. In my pursuit of developing project management quotes, I always try to compose new ones that represent general and project management, this is the first of a series I am going to start on this blog where I will include a quote of mine and explain the reason behind it, just like Why Projects Fail series, I hope you will enjoy this series of unique quotes!

Do you know the HIPPO? not the hippopotamus animal, it is a different HIPPO, a HIPPO is an acronym that stands for a “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” or “Highest Paid Person in Organization”, whether you work in a small or gigantic enterprise, you will always find a HIPPO (aka CEO) around, chances are you will be invited to a meeting to take a critical decision that may impact your project or sometimes the entire organization, and so the decision will hit your project either positively or negatively. in this post you will learn 5 ways to influence a HIPPO.

If you work on IT projects and have not heard about Marketecture before this is a must read for you, Marketecture (Marketing Architecture) is a very common technique that most of vendors use to market and sell their products, in Marketecture, marketing people use the architectural advantages of a product to tout it and influence the client’s decision to buy the product, often times Marketecture is planned in the very early stages of the product planning and prior to the product build, as a project manager you have to protect your project from Marketecture, read on to know how Marketecture works and what precautions you can take to avoid falling in the Marketecture trap.

In part three we will examine a very interesting root cause which will make a lot of people scratch their heads, it is Project Manager, yes the project manager is one of the root causes why projects fail, while from the first look this may seem awkward as so many people will simply say that projects fail when there is no project manager, however in my humble opinion a considerable percentage of projects fail because of poor project management, let’s see the sub causes.