The Role of Conversations in Projects

This is a slightly updated presentation of a talk I gave at Atlanta’s Project Developer Days a few years ago. After attending a two day training session with Jeff Sutherland, I believe that this concept is relevant to the Agile and SCRUM Project Management conversation.  From my experience, improving the performance of the conversations on your projects greatly improves the performance of the project team. When we say we want to get better at communications, I believe we want to improve the quality and effectiveness of the project conversations. The project managers job in leading projects requires us to be good at recognizing what conversations need to take place, and facilitating them to a successful conclusion.

The Role Of Conversation In Projects

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Observations, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The Role of Conversations in Projects”

  1. Dean says on March 6th, 2009 at 8:18 am :

    Well put.

    Effective conversations lead to effective Planning (think PDCA loop) at the project task level. The conversation tools presented here will certainly improve conversations and project achievment.

    But change is hard. It requires training, accountability and discipline to make this a standard practice and change the culture. Management and organizational commitment is critical.

    At a personal level it requires patience, time and personal mastery of the skills.

    The organization willing to make the effort will reap rewards of Lean project execution.

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