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Project Management Happy Hour: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Kim Essendrup and Kate Anderson
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.
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- 2 weeks ago33 min
133: The Introvert's guide to Communication for Project Managers
Why "over-communicating" isn't about saying more — it's about knowing exactly what your stakeholders need to hear, and when. What happens when a project manager goes silent? According to this episode of Project Management Happy Hour, nothing good. Left in an information vacuum, stakeholders don't assume the best — they assume the worst. That single insight sits at the center of a conversation about project leadership, stakeholder communication, and the quiet skill that separates good project managers from great ones: knowing exactly what to say, to whom, and when. If you've ever been accused of "running dark" on a project, or been told to simply "communicate more" without any idea what that actually means, this episode is for you. Kate and Kim open up about their own early missteps as project managers — Kim recalling a boss who relentlessly demanded he "over communicate" without explaining what that looked like in practice, and Kate admitting that while she never struggled to talk to her own team, she took years to learn how to communicate effectively up and out to executives and sponsors. Their honest, back-and-forth storytelling style — equal parts practical and funny — turns what could be a dry topic into a genuinely useful conversation about project delivery and leadership communication. Grab a drink and join us. Quotes from the Episode "The human brain is not nice. It takes lots of therapy and or meditation to tell yourself nice stories... if you're in an information vacuum, because our brain wants to protect us from bad things happening." — Kate Anderson "Data is meaningless without context and contrast." — Tim Creasy <span style= "font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;
- Aug 25, 202651 min
132: Why Your Most Supportive Stakeholder is Ruining your Project, with Dawn Mahan
Projects rarely fail from a lack of templates — they fail because of people. Author Dawn Mahan reveals the animal avatars that help you spot the cheerleader, the finicky fan, and the saboteur before one of them bites you in the ankle. Why do projects really fail? Not, as guest Dawn Mahan argues, from a shortage of templates or Gantt charts — but from the people around them. In this episode, Kim and Kate dig into the human side of project delivery: the stakeholders who love your project, the ones who quietly want it dead, and the "style under stress" that surfaces when the pressure cooker of Projectland heats up. If you've ever been blindsided by a saboteur or tripped up by an over-eager cheerleader, this conversation on stakeholder management, risk, and project leadership is for you. Kim and Kate welcome Dawn Mahan, author of the bestselling Meet the Players in Project Land and co-editor of Project Land Goes to the Movies: 22 Blockbuster Strategies for Project Success. Dawn's premise is refreshingly human: projects rarely fail because the paperwork is wrong — they fail because the people involved aren't set up for success. Using animal avatars to make stakeholder behavior easier, and safer, to talk about, she gives project managers and leaders a practical vocabulary for the messy, political, feelings-driven reality of getting work done inside real organizations. Grab a drink and join us. Quotes from the Episode "If you're skipping through the meadow of project land toward your goal, one might just jump up and bite you in the ankle when you least expect it…" — Dawn Mahan <h1 dir="ltr" style= "line-
- Aug 12, 202650 min
131: Don't be the PM everyone hates, with Rachel Losser
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 Every PM strength has a shadow. Each of the five personas is a positive skill (document
- Jul 29, 202638 min
130: Rigged bids, fake deadlines, and going 181x over budget
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 <span style= "font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-spac
- Jul 14, 202635 min
129: How Credibility Starts with Curiosity, with Noel Nicole Ransom
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 <span style= "font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; font-weight: 400; font-style: italic; font-variant: norma
- Jun 30, 202633 min
128: Your project can't possibly be as bad as working for Mr Beast, Part 2
Ever worked on a project that felt like a complete disaster... only for leadership to call it a huge success? In Part 2 of our Mr. Beast series, Kim and Kate dig into the reported chaos behind Beast Games—from weather disasters and safety concerns to unhappy contestants, lawsuits, and production challenges. But here's the twist: despite all the problems, does the sponsor spin it as a win? If they did - would they be 'right?' This episode explores project sponsors, stakeholder management, risk management, and one uncomfortable truth many project managers eventually learn: success is often defined by the people funding the project—not the people doing the work. Kim and Kate unpack what happens when ambitious goals collide with reality, why sponsors often see projects differently than project managers, and why writing your own project post-mortem may be one of the most important leadership skills you can develop. Grab a drink and join us. Quotes from the Episode "Imagine that guy pouring down rain. He's in ankle deep water holding a 240 volt line over his head thinking, well, at least I'm getting paid for this." — Kate "Watch out for fixes that move the problem instead of solving it." — Kim Practical Takeaways When project scope or scale increases dramatically, bring in people who have experience operating at that level. Challenge proposed solutions by asking whether they solve the root cause or simply move the problem elsewhere. Escalate business-level risks back to leadership when leadership made the decision to accept those risks. Build post-mortems that document both successes and failures—not just one side of the story. Tailor project communication to sponsor priorities while still surfacing risks clearly and consistently. Closing Reflection A project can be operationally messy and still be considered a success by its sponsors. The question isn't just whether a project succeeded—but whose definition of success ultimately mattered. 🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned PM Happy Hour Membership: pmhappyhour.com/membership PM Happy Hour Facebook Page Folding Ideas — Why Was I Invited to Beast Studios? Rolling Stone article by Stephen Essarch: A Fyre Fest Feeling Inside the Chaos of Mr. Beast's New Reality Show KSNV article by Minx and Lau: Las Vegas Staff Say Mr. Beast Should Be Blacklisted, Cite OSHA, Medics Set for Failure
- Jun 16, 202628 min
127: Your project can't possibly be as bad as working for Mr Beast, Part 1
Ever worked with a stakeholder who changes direction faster than your project plan can keep up? Then this episode may feel a little too familiar. Kim and Kate dive into the rise of Mr. Beast and the making of Beast Games through a project management lens—not to critique content creation, but to examine what happens when vision outpaces execution. From sponsor behavior and scaling challenges to agile gone sideways, they unpack the risks of massive ambition without the systems to support it. If you've ever managed shifting priorities, difficult stakeholders, or a project that seemed to grow by the hour, this conversation will hit home. Grab a drink and join us for a fascinating look at project sponsors, leadership, and what real-world project management can learn from internet-scale production. 🎙️ Spicy Quotes from the Episode "Those poor people. Those poor people. I feel so bad." — Kate "This has to be a textbook case of the absolute worst project sponsor I have ever seen." — Kim Key Concepts & Takeaways The Sponsor Shapes the ProjectKate frames Mr. Beast not as a creator but as a project sponsor. Great sponsors create alignment; difficult ones can unintentionally create chaos, rework, and burnout. Scale Changes EverythingWhat works at small scale may not work as it scales up - in this case, scaling from Youtube videos to a massive $100m production involving thousands of participants and multiple organizations. Scaling requires stronger processes, decision making, and management support - not just bigger budgets. Empathy Matters in Project ManagementKate repeatedly returns to the human side of projects: behind every schedule slip or scope change are real people doing the work. Practical Takeaways Evaluate sponsor behavior early, not just project requirements. Reassess processes when projects scale dramatically. Governance doesn't slow decisions - it can help speed them and ensure your project can effectively absorb changing priorities. Consider the human impact of ambitious timelines and scope changes. Distinguish between innovation and avoidable chaos. 🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned Folding Ideas video: "Why Was I Invited to Beast Studios?" (https://youtu.be/0dwagg5wYY4?si=wNMmjhncv06AqUul) Project Management Happy Hour Website PM Happy Hour Membership
- Jun 3, 202639 min
126: "What's your AI Strategy?" Handling the Executive who wants AI in everything
You know the moment. Your project plan is solid. The scope is defined. The team is ready. Then an executive walks by and casually asks: "Can we just make this AI?" Suddenly you're no longer managing a project. You're managing expectations, buzzwords, corporate excitement, and whatever article someone just read on the flight home from a conference. In this episode, Kim and Kate tackle the question nearly every project manager is hearing right now: What's your AI strategy? They discuss why this isn't the first technology hype cycle we've lived through, how to respond when leaders want AI without knowing what they actually want AI to do, and why saying "yes" doesn't mean committing to anything. Along the way, they unpack executive AI buzzwords, governance concerns, AI productivity myths, vibe coding, project management tools, and where AI genuinely helps versus where it's mostly creating noise. Most importantly, they share practical ways to stay credible, keep your projects grounded, and avoid getting swept up in the latest technology frenzy. So grab a drink, pull up your RAID log, and let's talk about surviving the AI gold rush without losing your mind. 🎙️ Spicy Quotes from the Episode "My eyes actually fell all the way out of my head and are rolling down the street. I actually can't see anything anymore." — Kate "Your project cannot be more mature than the organization." — Kim "AI is not like magic pixie dust you sprinkle on your project and suddenly magical things happen, right?" — Kim "AI is not better than you at project management. And it probably never will be." — Kate Key Concepts & Takeaways AI Hype Cycles Are Not New The technology changes, but the executive behavior doesn't. Before AI there was cloud. Before that there was blockchain. Every generation gets its must-have technology that promises massive transformation. Project managers shouldn't panic when AI becomes the topic of every conversation. The important skill isn't becoming an AI expert overnight. It's understanding enough to have an informed conversation. Other key concepts covered: Learn the Language Without Drinking the Kool-Aid Don't Let Projects Outrun Governance Ask "How?" Before You Ask "Why Not?" AI Is Only As Good As Your Data AI Helps More With Starting Than Finishing Closing Reflection The next time someone asks, "What's our AI strategy?" maybe the better question is: "What problem are we actually trying to solve?" Because the organizations that benefit most from AI probably won't be the ones chasing every new buzzword—they'll be the ones that stay focused on outcomes while everyone else is getting distracted by the hype. 🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned Project Management Happy Hour Website PM Happy Hour Membership
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About Project Management Happy Hour
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.
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