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Susanne Madsen’s Project Management Coaching Workbook teaches you how to use a coaching style when working with project managers.
Susanne Madsen’s Project Management Coaching Workbook states that it is not your ability to manage tasks and resources that will make a difference. It is your ability manage relationships and lead the team to success by vision and engagement. You will be able to accomplish your projects with your drive, confidence and determination.
Madsen has written a unique and practical book for project managers who want to improve their craft, or who are aspiring to become project managers coaches.
These exercises and checklists can be used to assess yourself and improve your skills. If you work with others as a coach, this workbook can guide your coaching efforts.
6 steps to self-coaching
Madsen offers six steps to help with self-coaching exercises.
Your vision is yours
Benchmark current skills
Get feedback
Create an action plan
Check out these guiding practices
Review progress
This book will help you to follow the six steps necessary to become your coach. It will help you identify the areas in which you lack proficiency and help you improve them.
This requires you to determine where you are at the moment. This involves both self-assessment and feedback from colleagues.
Feedback is a tool for improving skills
It is a workbook and contains spider diagrams about each project management dimension. These include quality control, stakeholder management, time management, and many other areas.
This exercise will instantly give you a rating of your project management skills in 80 areas.
To get a complete picture of how customers perceive your performance, you can repeat the exercise with your manager and other team members. All of this information can be recorded in the workbook. To get feedback from multiple people, you might want to photocopy the pages.
This is where you can identify areas of improvement. This assessment can be used to coach a member or your project team using Madsen’s book.
Keep going for success
Madsen writes:
“One of the key differences between successful and average people is that successful people aren’t afraid to face challenges or obstacles. They find the root cause of the problem and change their approach accordingly. They can overcome any roadblocks they encounter but they don’t blame others. Instead of being passive and reactive, they adopt a proactive approach to take action. They are proactive and continue to explore new ways.
She suggests you create a support group of project managers to provide guidance and support. This could be a great idea, especially if your mentor or coach is not available and you are trying to improve.
If you don’t have any connections within your company, you could join an external group such as the APM or project manager organization. You can also connect to online groups like LinkedIn or Project Management Cafe: my facebook group (come join us!) ).
Madsen provided the frameworks and forms required for a coaching assessment. She also offered tips and hints that will help you in particular areas. I particularly appreciated the advice to ensure that you understand the meaning of red, amber, green so that your reports are meaningful.
Although I prefer books that use the Oxford Comma to my liking, I found this book to have great structure and was very useful.
I would like to see the worksheets as a downloadable document.
