Smaller, poorly planned projects are likely nickeling and diming you. The cost is not just in dollars, poor project planning leads to unnecessary frustration and resentment for your teams. What can you do? Start by training your team to plan every project with this simple three-step process.

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If you start with an unclear set of expectations you are going to experience something called scope creep, where the project just keeps getting bigger and bigger and no-one is quite sure what “DONE” means for the project. To prevent scope creep, follow these three steps in the Initiate phase.

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Despite popular perceptions, project management is not just for large enterprises or huge undertakings. Projects are every organization’s change agents. Without them nothing improves; you simply maintain the status quo. And this is why projects can be so difficult, your teams are often building something they have never built before. A project is any temporary endeavor you undertake to create a unique product, service, or result.

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It is rarely the technical stuff that sinks the new manager. It is the people stuff. They know how to make a widget but they do not know how to lead and manage people to make the widget. So, to help you help your mangers, here are five expensive people problems we consistently seeing managers avoiding.

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Employees do not care about empty, motivational, “strategy” talks that simply re-package the same “work harder” message. But we know, based on our own research, that they do care about your organization. And they do care about your customers. The problem is not the apathy of your workforce, but that managers rarely are able to connect their work to the overall purpose of the company. Here are the most common reasons we have found why managers fail to communicate the overall company strategy to their teams. Also, we include five quick tips on how managers can connect their employees to your organization’s strategy.

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