I love getting involved with technical people and translating what they are working on into plain english.  At PLAYBOOK, we love great project execution and have spent 17 years developing methods and now a software tool that combines a number of principles from lean, agile and team thinking to create flow in new product development projects.  This process has taken years of success and failure to fine tune what works and what doesn't in terms of new product development projects.  A lot of the concepts we work with are counter-intuitive to many people. 

Concepts like, put less work into the system and you will actually produce more, faster, with less risk.  If you think of a highway, there is only so many cars (aka 'work') you can expect to add until the addition of one more car slows down everyone on the highway.  Another counterintuitive concept, DON"T multi-task. Multi-tasking actually causes you to complete less work.  The important thing is that everyone is working on the MOST IMPORTANT task of the day to support the delivery of a product.  

Being a project manager is tough, under celebrated and often miss-understood. Juggling the needs of so many players and keeping your team motivated is hard.  Hopefully some of these principles will help you tackle difficult problems as a project team and in the end, deliver a great product, full of customer value to market faster.  Read more about these principles here. If you are interested in project management and delivery, please share your thoughts with us and subscribe!