Founder & Principal at Delivery Is the Strategy™ (a NexTech Software Inc. practice)
Answered 23 days ago
Question 1: The leadership mistake I made that reshaped how I run PM teams I spent a decade optimizing for green status reports. Every dashboard showed on-track, every milestone hit, every vendor delivering. Then the CFO asked me to prove the $4.2M in promised savings from our ERP program. We had delivered the software. We had not delivered the outcome. I now run post-implementation value audits at 90 days, 180 days, and 12 months. If we cannot show the money moved, we did not finish the work. Question 2: One practice I would tell all the project managers I manage to stop following Stop sending status updates that read like diary entries. Your executives do not care that the infrastructure team completed 47 tickets last week. They care that the payment gateway is still offline and costing the business $18K per day in abandoned checkouts. Every status report should answer one question: what decision do you need from me right now to unblock revenue? If the answer is nothing, do not send the report. Question 3: The first intervention I make when delivery goes off track I ask for the original business case and give teams 24 hours to produce it. In my experience running recovery programs across financial services and logistics, fewer than half can find it. The rest have been managing to a Gantt chart for nine months with no memory of whether they were chasing cost reduction, revenue growth, or operational efficiency. You cannot recover a program when nobody remembers what winning looks like. Cosmina Buiga, Founder of Delivery Is the Strategytm and delivery executive with 25 years managing transformation programs. We provide execution control for mid-market digital transformations
Executive & Leadership Coach | Team Facilitator | Speaker at Dana Zellers
Answered 23 days ago
I'm Dana Zellers, Executive & Leadership Coach | Team Facilitator | Speaker. I spent 25+ years leading digital delivery and operations teams at Uber, Twitter, GS&P, and Publicis before moving into executive coaching. Today, I work with PMO and delivery leaders who are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources and less margin for error. The leadership mistake I made that reshaped how I run PM teams: Earlier in my leadership career, I took too much responsibility onto myself. I believed strong leadership meant absorbing the pressure and shielding the team. What I see now, both in hindsight and with clients, is that this limits shared ownership. The shift is having the entire team contribute to defining scope, surfacing risks early, and naming issues out loud instead of carrying them alone. One practice I would tell project managers to stop following: Stop accepting scope and schedule at face value. Many PMs feel pressure to say yes and figure it out later, but unchallenged assumptions almost always resurface as missed deadlines or strained relationships. The strongest PMs dig in early, pressure-test the plan, and clarify what is truly required versus what is assumed. The first intervention I make when delivery goes off track: I immediately realign everyone on scope, current status, and explicit trade-offs. We clarify where time can be extended, where scope can be reduced, and where expectations must shift. Most delivery issues are not execution failures, they are alignment failures that were never corrected. I'm happy to expand on this or provide additional context. I'm available for follow-up questions or an interview, and can connect on your timeline. Please let me know if this is placed so I can share it with my audience. Dana Zellers Executive & Leadership Coach | Team Facilitator | Speaker https://www.danazellers.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-zellers/
From the perspective of a Director on Solution Acceleration, I can see that there were many misteakes made out of lack of experience and tights deadlines. That's why I keep telling to my teams that it all comes with time but you need to try again and again, improving at every iteration. Early in my career, I micromanaged delivery details instead of empowering my PMs. That mistake taught me that trust and autonomy drive stronger outcomes than constant oversight. It's like fostering. You open an opporunity to grasp and a person uses it as a ladder to grow. Additionally, I tell my project managers to stop treating status reports as the main measure of success as soon as real delivery health is seen in stakeholder confidence and team compaund velocity. When delivery goes off track, my first move is to re-align scope and expectations with stakeholders before diving into task-level fixes. Like a backup to ensure we are aligned in our vectors. It prevents wasted effort and restores clarity.
Business Coach. Project Strategist. Wine Consultant at The Tailored PM
Answered 24 days ago
1. The leadership mistake I made that reshaped how I run PM teams - The leadership mistake I made that reshaped how I run PM teams was that I stopped treating everyone the same and this might be a little taboo, but once I got my PMP i threw some of that knowledge out the window. The PMP exam teaches us to be of stewardship. We don't make decisions we just guide. Not in the real PM world. a lot of companies are hiring us to actually organize, guide AND make the decisions. 2. One practice I would tell all the project managers I manage to stop following - One practice I would tell all PM's I manage is stop following is thinking you need your PMP to be successful. I was a PM for over 6 yrs before I got my PMP and I got it thinking I needed it to land a good job. WRONG! The PMP in my honest opinion looks good on paper, you get the real work and knowledge in the field. Get the certification if you truly want it for yourself ONLY, not for a company who you hope picks you. The right company will choose you with or without three letters behind your name. 3. The first intervention I make when delivery goes off track - The first intervention I make is immediately grabbing my mitigate guide I make for every project. If scoop creep is happing I'm turning to page 2 and if a shareholder has gone ghost especially if they have al ot of stake in the project I'm turning to page 6. Alywas have a plan for when things go off track.
1) Leadership mistake that reshaped how I run PM teams Treating everyone the same doesn't work; sometimes you need a tailored approach. People have different strengths, weaknesses, and ways of approaching problems, and failing to account for that led to frustration and underperformance. I learned to adapt my approach to each person—pushing some, giving others space, and tailoring guidance where it's needed. Leadership isn't about being fair on paper; it's about getting the best out of each individual. 2) One practice I'd tell PMs to stop following Dwelling too much on your decisions. The need for perfect clarity often arises for PMs early in their careers, but that's something that doesn't exist. Waiting for it slows progress, creates bottlenecks, and adds stress to the team. PMs should make the best call they can with the information they have, act, and then adjust as they go. Momentum itself creates clarity. Once you move, patterns emerge, and decisions become easier. This doesn't mean acting recklessly; it means being pragmatic and decisive. 3) First intervention when delivery goes off track Most delivery issues can be resolved through realignment. Deadlines give me the same feeling as going to the dentist; you know it's coming, and there's not much you can do to avoid it. Sometimes deadlines need adjusting, sometimes resources need shifting, and sometimes communication needs a reset. Most delivery problems aren't about effort; they're about focus, alignment, and realistic pacing. Bojan Rendulic, VP of Marketing at Productive.io I know you said 2-3 sentences max, but I think making them shorter would lose context. Of course, if needed, I can make the replies shorter.
I wish project managers would just stop with the constant updates. Most issues I've seen come from too many emails and pointless calls. We tried cutting back to one single weekly check-in instead. Suddenly everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing. It took some getting used to, but now it's the standard at Design Cloud for actually shipping on time. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email
#For Q1, I made the mistake of equating high activity at my job as a reliable measure of facility quality; therefore, I was constantly trying (and failing) to monitor hour-by-hour work. I learned through this experience that placing too much emphasis on tracking inputs via seuant (micromanaging) sucks all the fun and motivation away from the people doing the work; as a result, nowadays when I run PM teams, I never track anything other than how quickly my team is delivering on project milestones and how quickly they are closing out blocks. #For Q2, I continuously tell PMs to stop treating their original project plan as an immutable, living document; if you don't change your roadmap to reflect your current business value based on your most up-to-date data, you are doing yourself (and your organization) a disservice. #For Q3, when I am assessing an overdue delivery, I pause regular reporting and hold a 'bottleneck-only' meeting with the core engineering team. We ignore any distraction, and just focus on identifying what is the one technical or communication breakdown preventing us from moving forward with a critical path project. To successfully manage large scale delivery around the globe, you must be able to change course. To ensure that you achieve your intended outcome, you need to prioritize transparency and outcome over process; when you do this, your project team will naturally orient itself to reach the finish line.
Structured organizations are quiet when their delivery fails before they fail publicly. I used to think all experienced instructors could handle scheduling conflicts on their own without my help. However, these small delays added up, and students were the first to notice. This experience led me to manage the operational aspects of our program more closely. In today's world, I am quick to intervene when signals indicate that things are not consistent. I look at the missed milestones and who owns what. I tell project managers one thing they should stop doing is waiting for all perfect information before making a decision. The delayed decision will always be worse than an imperfect one. Effective Project Management leadership is defined by: 1. Clearly defining accountability 2. Having written confirmation of due dates 3. Addressing risk immediately 4. Encouraging upward reporting Once a team knows there will be no consequences for escalating an issue, its performance will stabilize. Project delivery improves when the leader builds systems to find problems early rather than waiting until late to react.
Confusing activity with progress has probably been my biggest PM and delivery leadership lesson. During periods of regulatory spikes in car finance claims, we could see mountains of detailed plans, stand-ups full of energy and hyper-clean reporting outputs. But, the story the metrics were telling (backlog ageing, decision latency etc.) was quite different. Instead I've learnt to focus delivery efforts on the velocity of outcomes and the risk exposure of delivery timelines vs. simply completing tasks. If delivery isn't going to plan today, the first thing I do is flatten the reporting structure and ask one question; where are we delaying value to the customer or regulatory certainty? Leadership, especially when your delivery is under the FCA microscope, is about closing the gap between problem recognition and decision accountability. Andrew Franks, Co-Founder, Reclaim247 (Claimsline Group)
Stop obsessing over your roadmap. It's one of my top pieces of advice for product managers drowning in intramural expectations. Particularly in results-driven digital businesses where CAC, attribution, and conversion windows interact with periodic review cycles, roadmaps predicated on anything besides business outcomes will generate costly inertia. If I step into a product leadership role and see slipping delivery, my first course of action is to reset product, marketing, and ops priorities around a single shared metric—the thing that's most loudly bleeding your results, often either conversion drop-off or document drop-off—and stop propping up sunk costs. Leadership is making decisions that optimise for validated business impact, not defending your PR plan. Chris Roy, Product & Marketing Director, Reclaim247 (Claimsline Group)
My largest leadership error has been to confuse busyness with accomplishment. Initially, I paid attention to whether my team appeared very active rather than whether they were making progress toward specific goals. The team delivered new features; however, the production pace decreased because priorities kept changing. At that point, I realized the team needed greater alignment and more agreement, not more work. I now have more tools at my disposal to use when a project is off track. I measure and report on all three factors mentioned above: cycle time, backlog size, and the delay in decision-making prior to altering course. I also train project managers to refrain from "over-commitment." When a project manager says yes to every request, it erodes their team's ability to meet their delivery commitments. To deliver effectively, you need: Defined priorities Metrics to see how things are progressing Signals that there may be a problem early in the process Escalation processes that are structured By focusing on fewer, clearly defined objectives, our teams' ability to deliver predictable results improved. Our teams will always perform better when expectations are consistent, and the costs of trade-offs are clear.
I'm Tom Terronez with Medix Dental IT. I used to be bad at communicating project changes, and my team would get confused and frustrated. Now, I schedule a quick check-in anytime a project scope might shift. It keeps everyone on the same page and saves us from costly mistakes. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email
Here's my advice for project managers: stop rushing to build things. At AthenaHQ, we learned that if we took time upfront to agree on what we were actually trying to achieve, projects moved faster. When everyone knows what success looks like, you avoid spending weeks fixing stuff that went in the wrong direction. That early planning saves you from doing the work twice. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email
I used to make a big mistake by not listening to my project managers. I thought my top-down processes were enough, but I was ignoring the people dealing with the actual daily problems. Now, I make a point to ask them what's broken and we change things based on their answers. The best fixes always come from the people closest to the work. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email
I used to think everyone knew what was most important. The result? Two teams built the same feature, wasting a week. Now I spend ten minutes upfront spelling out priorities. It stops confusion and wasted work. Honestly, it saves us time in the long run because people know exactly what they're supposed to be doing. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email