『Project Management Happy Hour』のカバーアート

Project Management Happy Hour

Project Management Happy Hour

著者： Kim Essendrup and Kate Anderson
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PM Happy Hour is the place for frank and honest discussion about real world issues in project management. We do it in a way that's not too dry, though it may get a bit salty from time to time. Each episode, your hosts Kim Essendrup and Kate Anderson cover a problem faced in project management today, and share practical advice, real-life examples and the occasional project horror story. Not only that, but every podcast is also an online class! Our host is a PMI Registered Education Provider, who has structured each podcast as an easy-to-listen-to lesson. To get credit, go to our web site at PMHappyHour.com, purchase your class, take the test (based on the content from our podcast) and you get your PDU certificate instantly!2026 | Project Management Happy Hour, LLC. 出世 就職活動 経済学
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  • 131: Don't be the PM everyone hates, with Rachel Losser

    131: Don't be the PM everyone hates, with Rachel Losser
    2026/08/12

    Your worst project management habit might also be your superpower — the trick is knowing which one you're wielding, and when.

    What actually separates a great project manager from the one everyone dreads seeing on their calendar? It's rarely a certification or a prettier Gantt chart — it's behavior. This episode of Project Management Happy Hour digs into project leadership, accountability, team dynamics, and the everyday habits that quietly undermine project delivery. The uncomfortable truth running through the whole conversation: our worst project management habits are usually just our genuine strengths turned all the way up, with no dial to turn them back down.

    Kate and Kim are joined by Rachel Losser, founder and managing partner of Losser Consulting Solutions, a delivery-focused firm known for its get-stuff-done philosophy. Together they walk through five "bad PM personas" — the versions of ourselves that colleagues quietly avoid — and, crucially, the more skilled counterpart each one can grow into. Rachel sets the tone early with a bit of grace: we're talking about these "with love and reverence," because everybody starts somewhere and most of us have been every one of them at some point.

    The practical throughline is nuance. Every strength becomes a liability when it's your only mode. Great PMs read the moment: when to slow down and build consensus, and when to say "we're going this way." They tell hard truths early, manage handoffs rather than just dates, and treat relationships and communication as the real currency of the job. As Kate puts it, the only way out of a struggling project is through it — not around the color of the status.

    Which persona are you under stress? That self-awareness, the hosts suggest, is where better project leadership actually begins.


    Grab a drink and join us.

    Quotes from the Episode

    "The PM has to be the brutal truth-sayer. Because if the PM doesn't say it, who's going to say it?" — Kim Essendrup "The only way out is through." — Kate Anderson "We had to live it to be able to write it." — Rachel Losser "You have no idea what people are motivated by until you implement something like that." — Rachel Losser Practical Takeaways
    1. Every PM strength has a shadow. Each of the five personas is a positive skill (documenting, reporting, follow-through, decisiveness, convening) overused into a liability.
    2. Report status honestly, then own the path back to green. Transparent "highlighter green" reporting builds credibility; greenwashing destroys it.
    3. Accountability beats date-moving. A Task Master probes why a deadline slipped and what will change, instead of silently updating the due date.
    4. Directive leadership works only in moderation. The Hammer is effective in a crisis precisely because they aren't operating at full intensity all the time.
    5. Every meeting needs a goal and buy-in. Confirming the objective at the top of a call is how you avoid becoming the Meeting Vampire.
    Closing Reflection

    Rachel's toast says it best: this is often a thankless job of late nights and "adult babysitting." But the difference between a PM everyone avoids and one everyone wants on their project usually isn't talent — it's the self-awareness to know which persona you default to under stress, and the discipline to reach for its better half instead. Which of the five is your worst habit — and what would its superpower version look like?

    🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned
    • PM Happy Hour Membership: pmhappyhour.com/membership
    • PM Happy Hour Facebook Page
    • Losser Consulting Solutions — Rachel Losser's firm
    • Big Project Energy with Rachel Losser
    • Rachel Losser on LinkedIn
    • Losser Consulting Solutions on LinkedIn
    • Rachel Losser on Instagram: @losserconsultingsolutions
    • Rachel Losser on TikTok: @losserconsultingsolutions
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    51 分
  • 130: Rigged bids, fake deadlines, and going 181x over budget

    130: Rigged bids, fake deadlines, and going 181x over budget
    2026/07/29
    A $6.9 million estimate. A $1.25 billion catastrophe. How fake deadlines, a rigged bid, and a steering committee allergic to bad news turned a routine payroll migration into one of the biggest project disasters in Australian history. What happens when project leadership treats risk management as optional, decision making gets diffused across committees, and a hard deadline turns out to be completely negotiable? You get one of the most instructive project failure case studies in project management history — and in this episode, Kim and Kate pour it out one painful lesson at a time. The subject is Queensland Health, the public healthcare provider for the Australian state of Queensland, employing roughly 85,000 people across about 300 sites. In 2005, their legacy payroll vendor gave them three years' notice: support ends June 30, 2008. Sounds like plenty of runway — until the organization waited two of those three years to act. By the time a consultant named Terry Burns (remember that name) ran the procurement and IBM signed a contract in December 2007, the original $6.9 million estimate had ballooned to a $98 million contract with just six months to deliver a system covering more than 24,000 unique payroll combinations. Why does this matter for project managers and leaders? Because almost nothing that went wrong here is exotic. Late project intake. Governance where a transition team, a steering committee, and an IT department all had partial authority but no single decision-making structure. Two weeks — total — for requirements gathering on a nine-figure program. A "lift and shift" strategy that preserved every broken process and demanded 2,500 custom software configurations to replicate them. As Kim and Kate walk through it, the episode becomes a masterclass in how ordinary project management failures compound into organizational catastrophe. The discussion highlights are equal parts horrifying and hilarious. There's the program's actual internal slogan, taken straight from the project materials: "Plan A or Die" — no continuity plan, no risk mitigation, no fallback. There's the June 2008 deadline that came and went with a simple change request and some extended support from the legacy vendor, prompting Kate's sharp observation that the date was fake and not fake at once: end-of-life risk is real even when the cliff turns out to be movable. There's the UAT phase in June 2009 that surfaced 2,422 severe defects — after which the steering committee simply reclassified high-severity defects as lower severity so the dashboards would show enough green to proceed. Watermelon project, indeed. And when frontline payroll staff kept failing the system in testing, leadership's answer was to remove the requirement for business sign-off entirely. The go-live in March 2010 delivered the reckoning: 35,000 payroll anomalies, roughly $400 million in accidental overpayments, zero-dollar paychecks for healthcare workers, and government debt collectors hounding nurses for money they never asked to receive. Queensland ultimately hired a thousand staff to manually prop up the new system — a 40 percent increase in labor over the old one — with a projected five-year cost to taxpayers of $1.25 billion. The commission of inquiry that followed, led by the Right Honourable Richard Noel Chesterman, revealed the final twist: Terry Burns, a former IBMer, had leaked a competitor's bid specs to IBM and browbeaten the selection panel into rescoring until IBM won. And when the state sued? A release buried in the fine print of a change order had signed away its right to litigate. Grab a drink and join us. Quotes from the Episode "Everyone's in charge, so no one's in charge." — Kate "If you've got a deadline, question the deadline." — Kim "I've heard the term watermelon project where they're green on the outside and red on the inside." — Kim "And you are paying that company that you're hiring to learn." — Kate "But ultimately, if your project options are plan A or die. Maybe sometimes the best option is die." — Kim Practical Takeaways Governance and decision rights — When multiple bodies share authority without a single decision-making structure, accountability evaporates ("everyone's in charge, so no one's in charge"). Deadline validation — Interrogate whether a project deadline is a true constraint or a negotiable date, and what options (like extended vendor support) exist beyond it. The watermelon project pattern — Recognizing status distortion, including reclassifying defect severity and removing sign-off requirements to force green dashboards. Parallel run as cutover risk mitigation — Why replacing a legacy business-critical system requires side-by-side operation and validation before go-live. Procurement integrity and vendor selection — The risks of conflicts of interest in vendor selection, of choosing a vendor with no prior experience delivering the solution, and of unreviewed ...
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    39 分
  • 129: How Credibility Starts with Curiosity, with Noel Nicole Ransom

    129: How Credibility Starts with Curiosity, with Noel Nicole Ransom
    2026/07/14

    Why do perfectly logical, well-researched project plans still fail to win people over? It's one of the most frustrating forms of project failure—not a broken schedule or a blown budget, but a smart solution that nobody trusts. Kim and Kate dig into that exact problem, exploring decision-making, risk management, and team performance through the lens of one hard-earned leadership lesson: being right is not enough. If you've ever done everything "to the T" and still hit resistance, this conversation is for you.

    In this episode, Kim and Kate welcome Noel Nicole Ransom—VP of Implementation, PMP, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, educator, speaker, and founder of Sigma Certify—for a wide-ranging conversation about project leadership and career advancement. Noel has led complex enterprise implementations, organizational change efforts, and strategic transformation initiatives, and now coaches professionals on bridging the gap between certification and real influence. The topic matters because so many capable project managers get stuck being seen as schedule-checkers rather than leaders, and that perception ceiling caps both their impact and their careers.

    This episode explores the throughline that credibility, not correctness, is what actually moves projects forward. Noel explains that organizations run on trust rather than logic, which means a technically perfect plan can still stall if people don't feel included in how it was built. From there, the conversation moves into what Noel calls the shift from "note takers" to "progress makers" — PMs who stop documenting problems and start solving them. She offers a simple framework for unresolved roadblocks: everyone needs an owner, an action, and a date, or it can't actually be managed. The discussion also covers how to work with resistant stakeholders by treating pushback as concern rather than defiance and how leadership conversations require starting with understanding before persuasion, since executives are rarely trying to win an argument—they're trying to get to clarity.

    Grab a drink and join us.

    Quotes from the Episode "Being right is not enough." — Noel "Organizations move mostly at a speed of trust and not necessarily logic." — Noel "You are not a glorified executive assistant." — Noel "Teams don't need more status updates. They need fewer barriers." — Noel "Leadership conversations really should begin with understanding before persuasion." — Noel Practical Takeaways
    1. Treat every unresolved roadblock as incomplete until it has an owner, an action, and a date—vague status updates don't count as progress.

    2. When a stakeholder resists, get curious about the underlying concern instead of pushing harder on your rationale; questions like, "What concerns do you have?" or, "What are you seeing that we're not?" tend to open doors that arguments close.

    3. When bringing ideas to leadership, come with a rough draft or "prototype" rather than an open-ended question—it invites collaboration instead of putting the entire burden of thinking on the other person.

    4. Resist the instinct to arrive with every answer buttoned up; asking thoughtful questions early, framed the right way, builds far more trust than appearing to have it all figured out.

    Closing Reflection

    The project managers who build lasting influence aren't the ones with the most airtight plans—they're the ones who build trust one honest conversation at a time. Curiosity over certainty, progress over perfection, and quiet obstacle-removal over box-checking.

    🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned
    • PM Happy Hour Membership: pmhappyhour.com/membership
    • PM Happy Hour Facebook Page
    • Noel Nicole Ransom's website: noelnicole.com
    • Noel on LinkedIn
    • Sigma Certify
    • Book: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
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    35 分
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