Episode 125 – Leading Projects: Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Are you learning project management from the school of hard knocks? Listen in for some pragmatic, practice-based insights into project leadership. Hear advice about psychological safety, building appreciation, organizational learning, risk analysis and much more. Tips to boost your project success and encourage self-managing, high-performing teams.



Table of Contents



01:18 … Meet Kiron04:53 … Psychological Safety07:15 … Soliciting Feedback09:25 … Building in Appreciation11:22 … An Appreciation Board13:32 … Accountability from Within14:31 … Embedded Continuous Improvement15:04 … Unconscious Yet Effective Delegation16:54 … Translating Lessons Learned into Organizational Learning18:12 … Information Radiators for Lessons Learned19:25 … Psychologically Safe Evidence Based Retrospectives21:50 … Leader Goes First22:57 … Retrospect on the Retrospectives24:00 … When Someone Leaves the Project25:45 … Building Bridges with Functional Managers27:02 … Risk Management27:57 … Risk Management as Insurance30:16 … Delphi Technique on Qualitative Risk Analysis31:54 … Words of Advice32:54 … Get in Touch with Kiron34:01 … Closing



KIRON BONDALE: When I started my career in project management, I was obsessed with the process side of it, the practices, the tools, the techniques of project management.  I wanted to build the world’s greatest schedule.  I ignored the people.  And I forgot that it’s people that deliver project outcomes, not the processes, not the practices.



WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Listeners, remember if you’re claiming PDUs, check out our website for the instructions for the new procedure.  I am Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates.



BILL YATES:  Hi, Wendy.



WENDY GROUNDS:  Good morning, Bill.



BILL YATES:  Good morning to you.



WENDY GROUNDS:  Today we’re very excited to have Kiron Bondale joining us by Skype.  Kiron is a senior consultant for World Class Productivity,and he’s worked in the project management domain for over 25 years.  He is also an active member of PMI and has served as a volunteer director on the board of PMI Lakeshore Chapter for six years.  And Bill, you’re going to tell us about his book.



BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I really enjoyed Kiron’s book.  It’s called “Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice.”  He’s a prolific writer.  He’s been blogging for years.  And he’ll describe what inspired him to write this book.  But this book is really practical, filled with advice for project managers, very topical.  We’re going to poke into some of the examples, but I really encourage people to check it out. 



Meet Kiron



WENDY GROUNDS:  Kiron, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest.



KIRON BONDALE:  Thank you for giving me the opportunity.  I really appreciate it.



WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to ask you first, why did you write the  book, and what was your thought behind this book?



KIRON BONDALE:  Yes.  It really was prompted by a challenge my father had given me almost two decades ago now, where when I told him I was thinking about starting a blog, and he looked at me, and he kind of said, you know, blogs are for amateurs.  And this is in the early days, when there weren’t a whole lot of people in the blogosphere.  But he kind of said, you know, forget about these 400, 500-word things.  If you want to be serious, write a book.



And my father and I, we disagreed on a variety of topics over the time we spent together.  But that kind of challenge stayed in the back of my head all of these years.  And when I got to roughly about 500 articles in the blog, I started thinking, you know, rather than having to create something from scratch, there’s enough good content there that it probably begs the question, could I not collate it, curate it, create a book from it?  And having some free time on my hands over the Christmas holidays last year,