Should we listen to “Gurus”?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by AnyaWorkSmart

“Guess correctly three times and they’ll call you an expert” – said a wise man. In the age of Internet and other mass-media guessing has become especially easy, as every correct prediction could be inflated beyond any proportion while small uncomfortable facts (such as the bankruptcy of companies created by famous business consultants) are downplayed to oblivion.

We are surrounded by Gurus of every possible expertise, offering their enlightened opinion on everything we want to know about, but does it make our life easier? Can we trust the majority of Gurus’ opinions? Should we listen to them at all? Continue reading →

Why it’s so hard to follow schedules?

Posted on February 12, 2014 by AnyaWorkSmart

There is nothing new in the fact that timelines established for the projects are rarely met. Actually, we got so used to this part of workplace reality that we consider it a problem only in the most outrageous cases – when the project’s cost exceeded every budgeting expectation or when it outlived its usefulness by becoming irrelevant.

Is there a way to improve this situation? Before we are able to answer this question, we need to understand what prevents us from following the schedule in the first place. Continue reading →

“Can a Non-Expert manage Experts?” – From Ask Anya mails

Posted on December 3, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

Following post : An Eternal Argument: Can a non-Expert manage Experts?

“I read your post carefully and I have to say that I completely disagree. In my experience, any attempt to manage IT developers without also being a technical expert is doomed to failure for several reasons. For one, the developers have no one to talk to if they encounter serious technical problems and need further guidance – non-technical manager cannot provide this guidance by definition. Continue reading →

More on Delegation: Micro-management and “Hands-On” Management Style

Posted on November 26, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

After talking to people about my post on Delegation I decided to expand the discussion to other related issues in Management that everybody knows about, but the general understanding remains vague, preventing fruitful actions. Today I would like to talk about the most frequent complaint of employees about their Managers – them being Micromanagers. Continue reading →

Your own PM style: Do You Have It?

Posted on October 22, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

How did we come to know what we know? Obviously, our first answer would be that we learned things in schools and universities and later acquired some practical experience in the job market. After that, we did our best to keep ourselves updated about the state of the art, visiting trainings and reading articles.

But I’m not talking about that. What I’m asking is how did you come to acquire your style of working, your working patterns, the certain way you do things – they didn’t teach you those things in the university. Continue reading →

The Other Top Ten posts of AnyaWorkSmart

Posted on October 1, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

After the warm reception that my previous Top Ten post received, I decided to add another one, but this time a little different. As most people do not have the patience to look through archives of the blog for posts that do not contain the easily recognizable keywords for topics of interest, I thought to remind my readers of several posts I published in the past that to my opinion are very important for everyone to know. Continue reading →

Living like a Boss: Project-Managing your life

Posted on September 24, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

When I was first asked to participate in a joint effort of PM bloggers to simultaneously publish a series of posts about their field, I asked myself a very simple question: what would be the single most basic thing about Project Management that I would consider critical for everyone to know? Continue reading →

Working patterns: Why do we constantly create new problems by trying to solve the existing ones? Part 1.

Posted on August 27, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

If you’re reading this blog, it means you’re spending some time on the Internet. It may also mean that while browsing you’ve encountered at least one of the endless variations of the “Doing it wrong” or “You had one job” memes.

If not, these memes make a laugh of exactly what their titles describe – how the simplest tasks performed by others could go completely and ridiculously wrong. Continue reading →

The right to rest – see you in two weeks! :-)

Aside

Even though I advised you guys against becoming the Lonely Hero who holds the world on his shoulders, this is a lot like I feel for the last few months :-). Wearing so many crucial hats simultaneously could be and is a hard job. So I decided that at least two weeks of not doing anything at all would be in order for me.

However, AnyaWorkSmart being still Anya Work Smart, there is no going on vacation, without leaving a relevant message behind. And here it is – make sure that you also remind yourself of your right to rest. Look at that like at another perspective of being a manager – manage yourself like you would manage others. And you do let your employees rest, right? 🙂

So, see you all in two weeks and I promise to bring a lot of vacation-inspired inspiration to the pages of my blog.

🙂

Onboarding – how to maximize your new employee’s potential

Posted on June 25, 2013 by AnyaWorkSmart

Welcoming a new employee into the Team could be a serious challenge, as there is always a chance that something would go wrong and precious potential would go wasted on unnecessary complications. Many pitfalls await the new guy as he tries to navigate the labyrinth of the new workplace: taking too long to start delivering, making a lot of mistakes and asking wrong people for help, being unable to connect socially because of trying too hard or not trying hard enough, and many others. Continue reading →