PM Insights Foster City - 

Managing Conflict Dynamics: What is under the surface?

Conflict is associated with significant cost to organizations. In the study of employees from nine countries, the average number of hours spent per week on workplace conflict varied from 0.9 to 3.3 hours. In the United States, the average was 2.8 hours.  The calculated expense based on average hourly earnings in 2008 was $359 billion in lost time. Frequent causes of conflict include lack of clarity with expectations or guidelines, poor communication, lack of clear jurisdiction, personality differences, conflicts of interest, and changes within the organization. Add to it the civil discomfort due to lack of diversity, equity and inclusion in our organizations, community, and relationships. These underlying triggers can also be a catalyst for disharmony and conflict on an individual and organizational level eroding the psychological safety. While conflict cannot be avoided, team members need to manage the insecurity and unpredictability created in these situations when working together in teams while apart in their own microcosm. 

Managing conflict is difficult because there are feelings involved. Expressing emotions is risky, however. Thus, many people try to manage conflict in ways that ignore their emotional content. Unexpressed feelings can leak back into conversation and can preoccupy people so that they are unable to be good listeners. The solution is for the parties to identify and understand their feelings, negotiate them, and share them clearly. I personally had a breakthrough when I studied and implemented mindfulness-based practices as a way of life and introduced emotional intelligence toolkit to influence the way people overcome conflict, reach agreement, and create value. These practices have a profound impact on both professional and personal life, as well as our mental and physical well-being.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Feedback When You Aren’t Face-to-Face

Delivering feedback is always difficult. When you need to provide feedback to people who work remotely from you, establishing a constructive connection can seem impossible.  This session will equip you with tools to prepare and deliver feedback remotely so you can achieve the outcome you want to happen.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Design Thinking for
Sustainable Project Management

Project managers are magical beasts.  You tell them exactly what you want done, and they will make it happen.  But what happens when we want a better, more sustainable world, but we have no idea what our end state looks like?  We want to do the right thing, and we’re questioning long-standing assumptions.  How can we come up with a new approach, a new mindset, a new way of thinking to solve the problems it took decades to create?  We need to expand our toolset to create a more sustainable world.  In this session, we will learn the fundamentals of design thinking, and learn how to apply those to transform our way of thinking about project and portfolio management.

PM Insights Foster City - 

The Gig Economy and Freelance Project Management

The rise of the Gig economy is one of the most transformative global economic trends in the past decade.  In 2020, 59M Americans, or 36% of the U.S. workforce engaged in freelance work.  75% of freelancers who left an employer to pursue freelancing full-time report making the same or more income than when they worked a traditional job.  Freelancers contributed $1.2 trillion dollars to the U.S economy in annual earnings in 2020, a 22% increase since 2019.  The prevalence of freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs will continue to accelerate as more businesses transition to project-based frameworks in pursuit of organizational agility.   

The Gig economy, once thought to be a short-term fad, is here to stay.  But what exactly is the Gig Economy? And why should expert project management professionals, both full-time employees of an organization and independent consultants, understand this growing trend?   Are organizations embracing outsourced project managers? 

In this session, attendees will learn what the Gig economy is, what factors contributed to its rapid growth, and what project professionals can do today to stay ahead of the curve in our new world of work.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Storyboarding and Metrics
for Early Products

How do we determine the right set of features to build into an early product, prototype, or MVP? It’s important to make the decision based on quantitative and qualitative data, however in practice, it is often difficult to reconcile the two. In this talk, Nick will show you how he and his team at Kromatic have used Storyboarding to help product teams prioritize their builds, and determine which experiments to run.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Applicable Agile Frameworks

Project management requires a series of plans and processes from initiation to completion. Almost all processes use most (and probably not all) of the 49 processes outlined in PMI’s PMBOK. As project leaders, we use a series of assessments, gather requirements, align resources, and plan and oversee deliveries of milestones till we successfully finalize our projects. 

Since early 2001, Agile frameworks have become winning tools in hands of project organizational leaders. There are many Agile frameworks to develop and deliver products and services to customers. We will focus on Agile as mindset, and examine Agile frameworks that are successfully implemented. We will discuss a few hybrids of Agile frameworks where teams and organizations benefited from them.

PM Insights Foster City - 

How participatory decision-making brings

innovation to organizations

Without vulnerability there is no innovation, warns Brene Brown.  The practice of participatory decision making puts the right group of individuals together to make a decision, regardless of title.  This seemingly simple practice builds trust and engagement throughout the company, and unleashes a tremendous potential for innovation usually stymied by organizational hierarchies.  

A Marketplace Network organization, which incorporates participatory decision making, aligns teams with the customer and company purpose.  It is, however, not possible unless vulnerability is embraced and manifested in the organization’s culture. 

In this interactive workshop you will learn about this “future of work” approach, look at case studies, and discuss in small and large groups how it can empower you at any level of the organization.