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While all brilliant innovators are PMs in their own right, they pale in comparison with Leonardo da Vinci. Here’s a summary of an excellent article by GanttHead on what you can learn from the master and how it can benefit you role has a project manager.

1. Be curious. Da Vinci was so curious, he wouldn’t take yes for an answer. At a time when no one questioned anything, da Vinci questioned everything.

2. Think for yourself. Da Vinci was not afraid to make mistakes and learn from them. And neither was every great inventor who followed him. da Vinci said, “Test knowledge through experience.”

3. Sharpen your senses. According to da Vinci, the five senses are the ministers of the soul. He trained his sensory awareness the same way Olympic athletes train their bodies. He warned against being locked into and blocked by the same thought processes.

4. Embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty. One of the most significant characteristics of highly creative people is their openness to the unknown and willingness to use their intuition. As a thinker far ahead of his time, da Vinci learned to translate imagination into a technical language and to experience major breakthroughs through intuition. In the same vein, Einstein imagined what it would be like to surf out into the universe on a sunbeam.

5. Balance art and science, logic and imagination with intuition. da Vinci felt that if you want to innovate, you’re going to have to cut loose from conventional grooves. The problem is that people are stuck in either a right- or left-brained world. The trick is to learn to be a balanced thinker. For da Vinci, that meant being creative, rigorous, playful and imaginative.

6. Balance body and mind. In addition to being mentally sharp, da Vinci was also a fitness freak. His recipe for a healthy mind and body: “Avoid grievous moods and keep your mind cheerful.” He also insisted that attitude affects well-being and stressed the importance of keeping mind and body lean and active.

7. Try to see how everything connects to everything else. “That’s system thinking,” Gelb explains. “Da Vinci said you have to see patterns, relationships and processes and how they all fit together.”

Full article - Leonardo da Vinci: The Project Manager’s PM by Bob Weinstein Gantt Head

Excellent customer relationship management (CRM) is everything into days business world - no mater who you are and what project you are working on.

The Services Safari blog posting “The Bad Behaviors of Service Professionals” gives us some key pointers on what constitutes bad customer service.

For your convenience, we have summarised these sins.

1) Lust - I’ve seen people try to charge in their after-hours wining and dining and expect some third party to pay for the enhancement of their love life.
2) Gluttony - How in the world can four people justify a $1,700 meal? I’ve seen people try it.
3) Greed - One enterprising lad tried to charge in two per diems when he crossed the international date line. Not surprisingly, he didn’t want to reverse the charge when he came back home.
4) Sloth - When lazy consultants or service providers charge people for time that they didn’t even work, it’s wrong and unethical. One practice particularly galled me. Some staffers got the answers to some self-study training materials. So, they charged in the time like they had done the work but they obviously didn’t. Worse for them, I re-tested these folks and they all failed. Then, I fired them for fraud.
5) Envy - I’ve known some partners with a bad imperious streak. They spent more that anyone else because they believed that they were better than everyone else. They weren’t.
6) Pride - “My clients are used to me charging them $8,000/month in expenses. I can’t come in under that!”. Yes, you can.
7) Wrath - Just because the client treated you badly doesn’t give you the right to stick it to them via your expense report.

For the full posting and for more customer service infractions click here

Following on from our last set of articles on why IT projects fail I would like to share with you 11 tips from Raven’s Brain on how to reduce them. 

1) Make sure to plan before starting the development or implementation.

2) Pay attention to tasks in the critical path.

3) Set up the necessary processes to calculate and inform the risk.

4) Ensure that the IT project has clear objectives.

Click here to read more