Paula Brossard, PMP

I attribute my success to hard work and taking feedback, even when it's difficult to hear. Sometimes it's hard to hear the bitter truth, like when someone tells you that you spoke to a person in the wrong way or with the wrong tone, and you need to adjust how you communicate. But by taking that feedback and putting it into practice over the years, that's probably the one thing I can say has made the biggest difference. It's not always easy to hear, but when you take that feedback and turn it into something more positive, that's what I've done throughout my career.

The best advice I've received is not to take things so personally in my career. I always took everything to heart, and everything was learned by working hard, digging, and learning all on my own. It truly helped me to hear that advice and to be given examples of what they meant, like don't take your projects too personally because in the end, you're gonna finish that project and move on to the next one. I think I listened to it about 50%, because even still now, I put my personal best in everything that I do, and I do it for the betterment of whoever's receiving my services.

I would say be patient and be detailed. Part of success for project managers as they're coming on and learning the skill is to ask more questions. We find in our project management field that failure of projects comes from trying to speed through the requirements gathering to understand what the true problem is you're trying to fix or repair. You need to take that and make sure that you understand how to get from where they're at now to the new outcomes that they expect. Taking enough time at the beginning is critical in order to be successful with the whole project.

I think the biggest challenge in project management right now is that leadership, and I'm not just talking managers and directors but higher leadership, think that projects can get done in a very short period of time. What they do is set a hard dead date, saying this has to be done by this date. Nine teams out of ten, and I can tell you I've led a lot of projects, the date they're looking at is not truly what the engineers and the developers and security and everyone on that team can actually meet. Most leadership don't understand what it takes to get from A to B. They rush through that first part of the project where you're finding out what the requirements are, whether they're functional or non-functional requirements. You have to take enough time at the beginning in order to be successful with the whole project. That's one of the things I try to mentor and lead my teams on.

Honesty would be at the very top. Unfortunately, we all run into times when somebody is not being as honest as they should be, but honesty is, as they always say, the best policy. For me, that's number one. Number two is to have an organization value their employees. If you show them they're valued, they work twice as hard for you. I think that's something that went away and is just starting to come back. I've seen it in a few organizations where they are putting focus more on their employees rather than the bottom line, understanding that those employees will increase their bottom line. I've seen teams and teams and teams over the years where that's what they do. I am always the manager who will never ask you to do anything I will not do myself.