Shared Project Management Softskills

Yesterday PMI Madrid organized the VI Project Management Congress.

It is always interesting to discuss on Project Management integrations, implementations, and procedures, with people from many different industries. Many things to apply to i18n and localization procedures even if coming from Energy, Pharmaceutical, Governance or Software Development.

A very interesting experience. Exhausting to be part of the team organizing something like this (close to 200 attendees), but very full-filing.

This sharing exercise with peers from industries that are in principle so different from the industries I am in, is one of the many benefits of collaborating with PMI.

I'll share a few interesting things from the "Soft skills" category:

Change rejection: Nothing really new, but it allows us to see that the same problems appear in different areas and companies of all sizes.

When changes come from upstream, the ones downstream tend to reject it. If improvements come from downstream, the ones upstream tend to reject it. (Notice my lapsus here with Improvement & Change... I leave the sentence like this...it actually adds some interesting meaning to it).

How to sell change: Improvements and changes: In order to succeed, you need to show in a tangible way how the change will benefit the individual. If there is no personal, short term improvement, it will be difficult for the change to be adopted.

"Companies need to play with this factor: a change in organization, process, is better accepted if the benefit is tangible for the ones that need to apply the change"

Perception and awareness:

Our mind is a categorization machine. We categorize everything. Changing things from one category to another is not simple.

Pygmalion (or Rosenthal) effect also affects managers perception: We need to be conscious that our perception of others can be (is) biased, and that the expectations we have from team members can definitely affect the response, feedback or performance we perceive from them. Meaning: we will tend to see only the responses that fit into the mind categories were we have placed our team members.