PM Insight Sunnyvale

Have you ever lost sleep because of a difficult stakeholder? Maybe it was a boss, a peer, or someone on the other side of the business. Perhaps it was worry about having to deal with them in an upcoming meeting. Or ruminating about how they are an obstacle to progress on a project.

So much of our success in leading and directing projects comes down to our ability to influence our project stakeholders. Experience teaches us that managing their expectations and building rapport with our key stakeholders can make an enormous difference in our ability to successfully deliver. But the truth is some of our stakeholders are difficult. And though you can unfriend people on social media, you can't unfriend a stakeholder--you have to learn how to deal with them.

In this session, Andy Kaufman shares six strategies for dealing with difficult stakeholders. There are no simple answers but these are strategies that Andy has shared with clients around the world, and you're invited to see which ones you can put into place.

After all, you deserve a better night of sleep!

Many leaders are eagerly awaiting the “return to the office” but most organizations are trending towards hybrid co-located and distributed teams - and underestimating the challenges they are about to face. Despite now having experience with full co-location and fully remote operations, blending remote and in-person interactions is more complex than “averaging” the two extremes. Ensuring that your People and Processes will thrive in a hybrid state requires targeted planning. 

Fortunately, companies with satellite offices have been building best practices on hybrid operations for years pre-pandemic. There is plenty of opportunity for smaller teams and companies to stand on the shoulders of giants as they plan for, or dive into, this new way of working. Starting with concepts like “structured informality”, this is a talk about the potential contradictions of hybrid operations and how to leverage them to your best advantage.

Your team has so much work to do; where do you start?  This presentation will highlight several techniques that ensure your team can identify important work and refine it to readiness. You can then execute the work using your favorite technique (Scrum, Kanban, etc.).

We will discuss one definition of Business Value which will lead us into the Impact Mapping technique. Impact Mapping helps us identify what needs to happen to generate business value. We will then move to backlog creation and management techniques whish are essential pre-work to delivering the solution.

Attendees should come to this session with a target business in mind, several sheets of paper for the exercises and one sheet of scratch paper.

Most teams work too hard, experience too much conflict, friction, and stress, and vastly underachieve their potential.  This is because every team member is unknowingly sabotaging both their own and their team's performance and well-being.

We will explore how and why we each self-sabotage, and how to maximize both performance and well-being simultaneously by focusing on the root-level mental muscles that impact both.  Just like we build muscle through physical fitness, building these mental muscles with mental fitness is the X-factor to boost leadership performance.

Silicon Valley is home to some of the most impressive technology companies in the world. Within this small geography you will find Fortune 50 companies mixed among a sea of startups. Each company will have its own unique culture, but there are some common traits among the two tiers of corporate and startup that set them apart.

I have had the opportunity to work on many different project teams across world class operations and within small early-stage startups. The main differences between the two are: working knowledge, stakeholders, available resources, agility, and speed.

What used to take me months to plan with a team of engineers and analysts in corporate companies could be accomplished in weeks with a small agile team of specialists in an early-stage startup. While the corporation is setting up their project boards in their favorite online shared resource, a resourceful project lead is creating lines of tasks in a shared spreadsheet at a startup.