The LiquidPlanner Blog

Sometimes, like during this current startup boom, it seems that everywhere you turn there’s an entrepreneur or biz guru pounding out the virtues of being innovative and creative. “Be a divergent thinker!” I heard a speaker recently proclaim. But how do we practice such virtues in daily life?

Well, LiquidPlanner’s Chief Product Officer, Charles Seybold, always has a unique perspective on trends, along with stretching the creative mind and challenging the status quo. So I recently cornered him bought him coffee to hear his perspective on divergent thinking.

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I was recently hired as the consulting project manager lead for a client who was on a tight budget. At project kickoff time he made a peculiar announcement: “No change orders, period.”

The only other time I had ever heard of such a thing was when I was working at a company that no longer exists. The CEO wanted to land a very large project so badly that he announced there would be no change orders on the whole project no matter what. It was a gutsy move and it won him the contract.

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It’s easy to think that “project management” is a new-world job description. Naming convention aside, creative and business professionals have been hammering out great work for a very long time – some with a better knack at juggling products and plans. Here’s a visual stroll down memory lane that highlights 5 great project managers and the mark they left behind.

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There’s an area in the LiquidPlanner offices where it’s super quiet except for the sound of keyboards tapping away. This is where our developers work heads-down writing their magic code to create new LP features and enhance current ones. Kelsey Schlarman sits in this pool of software engineers, and recently took a break to tell us a bit about herself. Read on to learn how she deals with boredom, where she vacations, and more.

Title and description of what you do.

Software Engineer. I help develop, code, and test new features for LiquidPlanner.

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“This is the single most important confluence of technology geeks!” exclaimed one of the GeekWire presenters.

And on that note, the GeekWire Awards got underway.

It was a perfect blue-sky Thursday evening when a sold-out crowd of 800 corralled at Seattle’s EMP Museum to rub elbows, swap biz cards and cheer on this year’s nominees. The evening was an impressive gathering of the top players and companies in a bustling startup community that, if you’re part of, makes you feel kinda proud and tingly.

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I don’t care what Tom Petty says – the wa-a-aiting is not the hardest part. It’s getting started, right? We have a goal and we know all of the pieces that must come together to make it happen. So why the struggle to dive in and get started already?

Psychological shenanigans aside, it’s usually just because we don’t know how to bring all of the pieces together. What are the options? So many choices! Sometimes I see this with new LiquidPlanner customers who are sitting down to build out their first project plan.

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“Kill the status meeting,” some management gurus cry. It sounds good – but is it a reality in today’s business world?

“Few events do more to suck the life and energy out of a team than the boss’s weekly status meeting,” huffs the ever-entertaining leadership consultant Art Petty.

Beyond “draining the lifeblood” from your team, Petty’s Leadership Caffeine blog offers four  reasons to un-status the status meeting in his post, 4 Reasons to Kill Your Weekly Status Meeting:

Time is precious. Don’t waste it.
The pain goes away when you stop meeting.

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Small mistakes can lead to huge blunders. The same can be said of the little bits of miscommunication that happen among your team members and leaders at work. The consequences of neglecting a tight communication process is high risk business.

To showcase our point, we’re going to look at three historical events where miscommunication had deadly consequences.

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Tatyana Mishel is our wonderful writer and editor – anything that has words on it, she sees it. After contracting for many years, Tatyana decided it was time to make a change and jump onboard with a company (us!) that she is passionate about. Read on for Tatyana’s strategy for Mondays and how she beats boredom.

Title and description of what you do:

I work in the marketing group as a writer and editor. I manage our blog – assigning, editing, writing – and then write marketing and web copy (whatever needs to be written).

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I’ve got a serious case of the Fridays.

It’s one o’clock on sunny spring afternoon. There’s a document to edit that is quickly abandoned for a fresh batch of emails that get ditched when I ask my co-worker about her weekend – a conversation I ride for as long as I possibly can.  And now it’s 1:09 pm.

Sound familiar? A wandering attention span at week’s end is nothing new. But how do you deal with it? My motto: Go with your mood, rather than railing against it.

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