Sami Taipale outlines 8 commandments for project managers: 1. Care about your team, customers, product, scope, schedule, budget, quality, users, sponsors and yourself. 2. Help others by solving problems and not just focusing on yourself. 3. Listen to employees, as they may solve their own problems through discussion. 4. Communicate clearly using the five W's - why, how, what, when, to whom. 5. Measure wisely as what is measured tends to be all that is achieved and metrics can be wrong and damaging if implemented incorrectly. 6. Plan your project and workdays, as without daily objectives you are just

1. 8 Commandments for
Project Manager
Sami Taipale

2. 1. CARE

3. This is where it all starts from. You
have to care about things to do them
well. Care about your team. Care
about your customers. Care about
the product. Care about the scope,
schedule, budget and quality. Care
about what needs to be done and
what must be left out. Care about
the users. Care about sponsors and
your boss. Care about yourself.

4. “Caring gives you a
compass, a direction to
head and most of all, a
reason to do the work you
do in the first place.
Care More.”
- Seth Godin
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/05/the-simple-antidote-to-a-corporatized-unfeeling-profit-maximizing-world.html

5. 2. HELP

6. “Successful people are
always looking for
opportunities to help others.
Unsuccessful people are
always asking, ‘What's in it
for me?’”
― Brian Tracy

7. “Leadership is solving problems. The day
soldiers stop bringing you their problems is
the day you have stopped leading them.
They have either lost confidence that you
can’t help or concluded you do not care.
Either case is a failure of leadership.”
- Colin Powell

8. 3. LISTEN

9. "Just being available and
attentive is a great way to use
listening as a management
tool. Some employees will
come in, talk for twenty
minutes, and leave having
solved their problems entirely
by themselves."
— Nicholas V. Luppa

10. 4. COMMUNICATE

11. ?
Why
How
What
When
To Whom

12. “Communication is
like engine oil: it
needs to be applied
to the machinery or
the machinery will not
start or, if it does, it
will quickly falter and
grind to a halt.”
- Max Wideman
http://www.maxwideman.com/musings/lifeblood.htm

13. 5. MEASURE
(WISELY)

14. “Perhaps what you measure is what
you get. More likely, what you
measure is all you’ll get.”
– H. Thomas Johnson

15. “It's a lot easier to get metrics
wrong than right, and the
damage done from getting
them wrong usually exceeds
the potential benefit from
getting them right.”
http://www.infoworld.com/t/it-strategy/the-four-fallacies-it-metrics-181517

16. 6. PLAN

17. “In preparing for battle I
have always found that
plans are useless, but
planning is indispensable.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

18. a.) Plan your project.
b.) Plan your workdays.

19. If you don't
have daily
objectives,
you qualify
as a
dreamer.
- Zig Ziglar

20. 7. ADAPT

21. “The survival of the fittest is the ageless
law of nature, but the fittest are rarely
the strong. The fittest are those
endowed with the qualifications for
adaptation, the ability to accept the
inevitable and conform to the
unavoidable, to harmonize with existing
or changing conditions.”
- Dave E. Smalley

22. But on the other hand...

23. “Reasonable men adapt to
the world around them;
unreasonable men make
the world adapt to them.
The world is changed by
unreasonable men.”
- Edwin Louis Cole

24. The more the changes in your
enviroment, the more agile and
adaptable you must be.

25. 8. PRIORITIZE

26. “There is never enough
time to do everything, but
there is always enough
time to do the most
important thing.”
- Brian Tracy

27. THANK YOU Sami Taipale
Project Manager / Agile Coach / Trainer
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/samitaipale