Recently a good friend told me that if you are not a man of your word that you can’t make, let alone keep, commitments. The corollary is that if you make a commitment you should keep it or risk degrading your “word”. A simple example is picking up a friend for work. You make the commitment but the night before you decide that you are not going to work the next day. You could justify not picking up your friend. But what would the impact be? What positive things could result from keeping your commitment? Your friend would upgrade their thinking about you and possibly make decisions about how they will react to needs that you might have.
Continuing my commitment to write projectmanagement411.com has required adjustment. I’ve adjusted what I write about, the reasons for continuing writing, and what benefits I personally receive. I look at this experience as a project that must be continued for my benefit as well as others. Keeping this commitment has resulted in learning things I never thought possible and establishing relationships that I would not have otherwise established. The personal reasons for considering breaking my commitment didn’t really matter to my “customers”. What matters is that I made the adjustments and continued.
One of the tough things to deal with in project management is resource allocation. Resources, like yourself, are asked to make commitments to multiple projects. Consider how you make and how you break commitments. Your integrity and word are at stake.
Don’t miss a post! Subscribe by RSS or EMAIL.
FREE eBOOK for EMAIL Subscribers!
If you subscribe by email I’ll send you my eBook for free! Here’s how: subscribe by email in the right hand column PLUS send an email post that you receive to bob.turek@b5media.com. (Sorry for the extra step- we don’t have this automated yet.)
To preview the book, or to order a hardcopy, go to my publishing web site by clicking the book cover.
Share This
