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Kimberly is the co-founder of the first project management blog to be associated with a university.
Read Kimberly's contributions to the blog at Check out the on-site archives of Kimberly's blogs. In September 2006 “The Art of Project Management” blog launched. The blog has been promoted almost exclusively by word of mouth and emails or links from Kimberly and me and our growing list of bloggers. Within 6 months the blog had several hundred readers. Since that time, there have been 74 bloggers who contributed 881 posts and 1,100 readers visit the site weekly. The blog has moved up the ranks in Technorati’s ratings and was once their featured project management site. There have been 105,000 visitors from 200 countries since inception and 3,200 click-throughs to the UCSC Extension site. |
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Kimberly is one of the founding bloggers at www.WholeLifeWellBeing.org:
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Project Connections Newsletter Archive
Overcoming "Last Century" Thinking: Powerful Metaphors for What Happens in the Real World
Kimberly Wiefling explores holism, nonlinearity, and emergence, and suggests how these modern perspectives on reality can give us a new perspective on our teams and projects.
When I first studied how the world worked I learned that light was a wave, atoms were made of particles called protons, neutrons and electrons, and you could take apart a clock to figure out how it worked. But as my education progressed, I learned that the world was a bit more complicated than the simple models I'd been taught.
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Catalytic Events – Effortless Ways to Change Behavior for the Better
What if we could create catalytic mechanisms that automatically, permanently, and effortlessly eliminated some or all of our recurring project problems?
The reason I'm so drawn to catalytic mechanisms is because they are effective, self-maintaining, and permanent ways to immediately change behavior, and require little or no further effort once they are in place and operating.
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Kollaboration Is Killing Me
What does it take to get people to appreciate and use a wiki? (No, seriously, what does it take?)
If you are struggling to harness the hydra of the group genius in your project team, I'm sure you'll be able to relate to some of what I've experienced with these three wiki experiments. It's just a tad painful, but press on if you're curious.
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The Where, Who, and When of Risk Management
There's more to risk management than what could go wrong.
Just thinking about risk from the standpoint of What threatens the all-too-often nebulous and ill-defined goals of a project just isn't going to cut it. We need to explore the Who, When and Where of project risk.
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Clarity — The Cure for Muddy Thinking
Is your project stuck in the mud? Here's how to steer yourself clear of it.
Muddy thinking is jeopardizing far too many people's success, and your project may be getting stuck in some of this mud. Here's my approach to thinking and acting with clarity in order to steer clear of the morass.
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Eat Your Spinach. It's Good for You: Having the Unpleasant Conversations You'd Rather Avoid
What unresolved performance situation is tapping you on the shoulder? Time to stop stalling and tackle it head on.
When performance is consistently "adequate," you owe it to your project, your team, yourself, and the person in question to have an open and honest dialogue about it. Otherwise, you simply feed the conspiracy of low standards that is the norm in many organizations.
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Here It Comes Again! Coping with the Worldwide Economic Mood Disorder and Other Recurring Problems
You can't solve a problem if you don't know what it's going to look like. So instead, figure out how to spot it and deal with it before it's fully grown.
While a lot of projects experience recurrent problems that are predictable and avoidable, some aren't. When prevention and avoidance aren't an option, it's best to have a strategy for rapidly identifying and dealing with them.
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Don't Try This Alone! Whacky for Wikis and Crazy for Collaboration
Kimberly Wiefling reviews her experiences with a few of the 21st century collaboration tools you may want to consider for your project efforts.
It seems to me that this should be a topic near and dear to every project leader’s heart. After all, this is what we spend much of our working lives doing—steadfastly facilitating collaboration in the pursuit of often seemingly impossible goals outside of the reach of a single human being.
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The Power of Negative Thinking – Project Management in Reverse
Kimberly urges us to embrace the dark side, unleash our inner cynics, and use their power for good in our projects.
In the right hands, [negativity is] a weapon of mass construction, freeing the mind of half-hidden dark thoughts, and an on-ramp to the superhighway of results in your project.
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The Project Leader's Guide to Steering Clear of Karmic Debt
Does a deadline-obsessed profession have any truck with a philosophy centered on accepting things the way they are?
When a friend suggested that I might benefit from meditation, and generally taking a more "Zen" approach to project management, I had my doubts. How in the world was I going to get anything done while being tranquil?!!
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Increased Emotional Intelligence and Teamwork Through Snack Foods
How some careful observation and a bag of candy can give you a better insight into the people you're working with and what they bring to the team.
There's no guarantee that a bunch of high EQ people will form a high EQ team (witness the US presidential campaign), but it's a good start.
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Being a Great Project Leader with a Mortgage and Kids in College
It's possible to be an effective project leader even if you need to keep your job. It's just not quite as easy.
In my experience, a project leader must often operate in an environment where the very people who sign their paychecks are also the biggest obstacles to success. But some people have asked what can be done if they DO rely on their job for the little niceties of life, like food, shelter, electricity and running water.
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Wild Success in 2008 through Optimism and High Self-esteem
Projects are messy business and extremely challenging even for the most experienced leaders. Kimberly reminds us that, when we are in the midst of project challenges, we have plenty of company.
"In spite of much rhetoric on the subject, and the holy grail of the triple constraint, you cannot measure your entire worth as a project leader, or the success of your project, purely by whether they are on-time, on-budget, and feature-complete."
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Agile Methodologies: Age-old Ideas in Fancy New Clothes
Do exotic new names make age-old best practices easier to swallow? A scrappy project manager will happily oblige.
"... my marketing co-conspirators tell me that a lot hangs on a name. It occurred to me that the same may be true for integrated product development and world-class project management best practices."
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Attitude of Gratitude: Celebrate Project Success... and Some Failures, too!
If you live long enough you'll eventually complete a project successfully. What's the best way for you and your team to mark such an accomplishment?
Do your hard-working team members really need another T-shirt? Kimberly suggests over 20 creative project rewards, not one of which involves putting a company logo on anything.
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Does this Hat Look Good on Me?
Trying on de Bono's Six Hats can give your team a completely different outlook on your project.
De Bono was intensely frustrated with the whack-a-mole approach to creative thinking and problem solving. He created this straightforward and elegant tool to encourage a more disciplined and repeatable method of generating results.
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The Politics of Tuna Sandwiches and Matrix Organizations
"How can we manage projects more effectively in matrix organizations?" Why not make the organization more effective for the project manager!
I've never been a slave to the status quo, so when I am asked how project managers can be effective in a matrix organization, I'm not necessarily quick to answer. To me that question is like inquiring into the political affiliation of a tuna sandwich.
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Danger! Projects May Be Harmful to Mammals!
How good PMs can fight the mobocracy of a project gone horribly wrong. Hint: It involves not doing anything—at least, not yet.
I haven't quite put my finger on it, but something I've noticed about the human condition that retards our ability to be successful project managers. When we see someone else fail we assume that they're just stupid, but when we ourselves fail it's simply an honest mistake or bad luck.
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Lost in Translation: Crossing Cultural Gaps in Project Management
Is your project team globally challenged? Seven things you can do to build project relationships that transcend cultural differences (and significantly boost your chances of success).
As a project manager, it was difficult enough getting a bunch of people who were in the same room, spoke the same language and grew up in the same country to get on the same page. Now practically every project seems to be spread over two or three continents and four or more time zones. Welcome to project management in the 21st century global village!
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Why Schedules Are Always Late and What to Do About It
Five reasons your projects always seem to be late, and five things you can do to make this one different.
When is the very first moment that you know a project will be late? For most projects, it's day one. My first project management text book proclaimed "A well run project takes from 50 to 100% more time to complete than predicted, and poorly run projects require two to three times as long as planned."
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Being Heard Above the Communication Blizzard
Are your key project communications getting lost in the avalanche? Try these suggestions for climbing out of the drift.
Is there any project manager among us who doesn't have a big old stack of email in his in-basket, a giant pile of unread documents on his desk, and an incessantly flashing "message waiting" light on his voice mail? Paper information is typically "filed" geologically, heaped layer by layer upon the pile until critical project documents are found somewhere in the Mesozoic Era.
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Fearless Project Leadership
As the project leader, PMs absolutely MUST tell execs how it really is. Kimberly outlines how to do it, fearlessly.
From the project kick-off, where the project leader may not even be involved, to the attempted premature launch of a less-than-ready-to-ship product, projects run a higgily-piggily route. This real-world path rarely resembles the neat, tidy, well-defined process described in the PMBOK® Guide.
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