The Influential Project Manager

If you want to be a successful project manager, you need to become a person of influence. Without influence, there can be no success as a project manager. And, although all key success criteria point to the importance of developing soft skills as a project manager, few books exist about how to develop the power of influence for achieving better project and business results. Filling this need, The Influential Project Manager: Winning Over Team Members and Stakeholders supplies detailed guidance on how to improve your influence skills to achieve better business results. It explains how to set and meet ambitious goals for you, your team, and your stakeholders. The book describes how to listen actively to influence others and details how you can build partnerships that can pay dividends for a lifetime. Each chapter highlights real-world scenarios about a particular subject linked to the influencing skill being covered. Each chapter also includes practical forms, templates, helpful tips, and best practices to help you develop and refine your skills of influence. Details the ten keys to influencing others to support you and your ideas Outlines techniques for improving your listening skills Includes a trust assessment for determining your level of influence and if others see you as trustworthy Demonstrates how to build a network of informal alliances to achieve success Supplying you with the vision of influence from an experienced project manager’s perspective, this book will help you procure the informal power required to become a successful influencer. After reading the text and performing the trust assessment, you will gain the understanding required to lead project members down the path to project success.

If you want to be a successful project manager, you need to become a person of influence. Without influence, there can be no success as a project manager. And, although all key success criteria point to the importance of developing soft skills as a project manager, few books exist about how to develop the power of influence for achieving better project and business results. Filling this need, The Influential Project Manager: Winning Over Team Members and Stakeholders supplies detailed guidance on how to improve your influence skills to achieve better business results. It explains how to set and meet ambitious goals for you, your team, and your stakeholders. The book describes how to listen actively to influence others and details how you can build partnerships that can pay dividends for a lifetime. Each chapter highlights real-world scenarios about a particular subject linked to the influencing skill being covered. Each chapter also includes practical forms, templates, helpful tips, and best practices to help you develop and refine your skills of influence. Details the ten keys to influencing others to support you and your ideas Outlines techniques for improving your listening skills Includes a trust assessment for determining your level of influence and if others see you as trustworthy Demonstrates how to build a network of informal alliances to achieve success Supplying you with the vision of influence from an experienced project manager’s perspective, this book will help you procure the informal power required to become a successful influencer. After reading the text and performing the trust assessment, you will gain the understanding required to lead project members down the path to project success.

This book is a comprehensive and practical guide to the core skills, activities, and behaviors that are required of product managers in modern technology companies. Product management is one of the fastest growing and most sought-after roles by job seekers and companies alike. The availability of trained and experienced talent can barely keep up with the accelerating demand for new and improved technology products. People from nontechnical and technical backgrounds alike are eager to master this exciting new role. The Influential Product Manager teaches product managers how to behave at each stage of the product life cycle to achieve the best outcome for the customer. Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without wielding much direct power or authority. If you don't know how to influence people at all levels of the organization, how will you create the best possible product? This comprehensive entry-level textbook distills over twenty years of hard-won field experience and industry knowledge into lessons that will empower new product managers to act like pros right out of the gate. With teaching experience both from UC Berkeley and Lynda.com, the author boils down the most complex topics into principles that are easy to memorize and apply. This book methodically documents the tools product managers everywhere use to align their teams with market needs and organizational goals. From setting priorities to capturing requirements to navigating trade-offs, this book makes it easy. Not only will your product succeed, you'll succeed, too, when you read the final chapter on advancing your career. Let your product's success become your success!

The Complete Project Manager: Integrating People, Organizational, and Technical Skills is the practical guide that addresses the “soft” project management skills that are so essential to successful project, program, and portfolio management. Through a storytelling approach, the authors explain the necessary skills—and how to use them—to create an environment that supports project success. They demonstrate both the “why” and the “how” of creatively applying soft project management skills in the areas of leadership, conflict resolution, negotiations, change management, and more. This guide has an accompanying workbook, The Complete Project Manager's Toolkit , sold separately.

In organizations today, getting work done requires political and collaborative skills. That’s why the first edition of this book has been widely adopted as a guide for consultants, project leaders, staff experts, and anyone else who does not have direct authority but who is nevertheless accountable for results. In this revised edition, leadership gurus Allan Cohen and David Bradford explain how to get cooperation from those over whom you have no official authority by offering them help in the form of the “currencies” they value. This classic work, now revised and updated, gives you powerful techniques for cutting through interpersonal and interdepartmental barriers, and motivating people to lend you their support, time, and resources.

The Complete Project Manager, 2nd Edition updates a respected textbook on project management soft skills to include project management's most vital new trends: agile methods, delivering business value, respecting ethics, and managing diversity. This is a classic, bestselling, practical guide that addresses the "soft" project management skills that are so essential to successful project, program, and portfolio management. Through a storytelling approach, the authors explain the necessary skills and how to use them to create an environment that supports project success. They demonstrate both the "why" and the "how" of creatively applying soft project management skills in the areas of leadership, conflict resolution, negotiations, change management, and more. This second edition features new sections on ethics, business analysis, agile project management, managing across generations and between cultures, and more. Skills like leadership, negotiations, conflict management, and navigating organizational politics have always been important for project managers who want to succeed. Now the authors show how you can adjust and hone those skills given the forces and trends in today's business world.

Why do so many software projects fail? The reality is that many of these projects are led by programmers or developers thrown into the role of project manager without the necessary skills or training to see a project through successfully. Patricia Ensworth has written a hands-on survival guide designed to rescue the "accidental project manager" and help them to quickly ramp up on all key areas involved in software project management. This book provides a no-nonsense, jargon-free approach to getting the job done. With the help of useful templates, checklists, and sample forms, as well as pointers to essential resources, Ensworth gives concise, easy-to-understand advice on everything needed to hit the ground running--including phases of project development, role assignment in the development team, the tools of the trade, and criteria for success.