People make Project Management an art!

Good PM 1 – Say No when needed

Posted: October 13th, 2008 | Tags: , | 2 Comments »

Continuing from my previous discussion:

“Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.”
- Josh Billings

I think the above quote summarizes it. A “good” project manager will know that responding and reacting are not the same. There needs to be a “thought” process in between.  At the same time there should be a caution not to go into an analysis paralysis in coming up with the answer.

If the answer is “No” then the “good” project manager will know how to package this.  The old cliche holds true here – “it is not what you say but how you say it” My personal experience is that the ability to convey a “No” answer is something that has to be taught in most cases and takes some time and experience to develop. (refer to discussion here at Crossderry)

Due to the fact that a lot of project managers never develop this ability we end up with a large amount of scope creep and gold plating on projects.
This point will later become more apparent when I get to the point about “making a deal”.

2 Comments on “Good PM 1 – Say No when needed”

  1. 1: Tanmay said at 6:31 am on October 14th, 2008:

    Well said. Learning to say “No” is an important career skill for professionals – specially those in project management. Scope creep largely happens because of lack of focus/boundaries on agreed scope and a PM’s inability to say “No”.

    Loved that quote.

  2. 2: Saying “No” the right way « Crossderry Blog said at 7:40 pm on January 8th, 2009:

    [...] blog is here).  I had forgotten to link to his original post on saying “No” as a PM (here), so his follow up post on when and how to say “No” (here) was an appreciated [...]

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