Kimberly Wiefling

Kimberly Wiefling is the founder of Wiefling Consulting, a scrappy global business leadership and project management consulting practice enabling companies to tackle the impossible and get at LEAST partial credit! A physicist by education, she worked at HP for ten years in technical leadership and project management roles. From there she journeyed to the wild and crazy world of Silicon Valley startups just a tad before the bust of 2001—when she helped run an entire company into the ground as VP of Program Management for a Xerox Parc spin-off that was eventually purchased by Google.

Kimberly is an instructor for UC Santa Cruz Extension's Onsite Training Department, and also facilitates an active blog on The Art of Project Management in cooperation with the program. She holds an M.S. in Physics from Case (in her words, the perfect preparation for her specialty of "tackling the impossible") and teaches leadership and project management around the world, from Armenia to Tokyo to the Silicon Valley in California. Kimberly is the executive editor of The Scrappy Guides® book series, and her radio show "The Scrappy Dialogues" airs occasionally on her web site. In 2007 she published Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces (along with a hysterical video documenting the final phase of completing the book). You can reach her via email at kimberly@wiefling.com.

Being a Great Project Leader with a Mortgage and Kids in College
It's possible to be an effective project leader even if you need to keep your job. It's just not quite as easy.
In my experience, a project leader must often operate in an environment where the very people who sign their paychecks are also the biggest obstacles to success. But some people have asked what can be done if they DO rely on their job for the little niceties of life, like food, shelter, electricity and running water.
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Wild Success in 2008 through Optimism and High Self-esteem
Projects are messy business and extremely challenging even for the most experienced leaders. Kimberly reminds us that, when we are in the midst of project challenges, we have plenty of company.
"In spite of much rhetoric on the subject, and the holy grail of the triple constraint, you cannot measure your entire worth as a project leader, or the success of your project, purely by whether they are on-time, on-budget, and feature-complete."
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Agile Methodologies: Age-old Ideas in Fancy New Clothes
Do exotic new names make age-old best practices easier to swallow? A scrappy project manager will happily oblige.
"... my marketing co-conspirators tell me that a lot hangs on a name. It occurred to me that the same may be true for integrated product development and world-class project management best practices."
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Attitude of Gratitude: Celebrate Project Success... and Some Failures, too!
If you live long enough you'll eventually complete a project successfully. What's the best way for you and your team to mark such an accomplishment?
Do your hard-working team members really need another T-shirt? Kimberly suggests over 20 creative project rewards, not one of which involves putting a company logo on anything.
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Does this Hat Look Good on Me?
Trying on de Bono's Six Hats can give your team a completely different outlook on your project.
De Bono was intensely frustrated with the whack-a-mole approach to creative thinking and problem solving. He created this straightforward and elegant tool to encourage a more disciplined and repeatable method of generating results.
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The Politics of Tuna Sandwiches and Matrix Organizations
"How can we manage projects more effectively in matrix organizations?" Why not make the organization more effective for the project manager!
I've never been a slave to the status quo, so when I am asked how project managers can be effective in a matrix organization, I'm not necessarily quick to answer. To me that question is like inquiring into the political affiliation of a tuna sandwich.
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Danger! Projects May Be Harmful to Mammals!
How good PMs can fight the mobocracy of a project gone horribly wrong. Hint: It involves not doing anything—at least, not yet.
I haven't quite put my finger on it, but something I've noticed about the human condition that retards our ability to be successful project managers. When we see someone else fail we assume that they're just stupid, but when we ourselves fail it's simply an honest mistake or bad luck.
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Lost in Translation: Crossing Cultural Gaps in Project Management
Is your project team globally challenged? Seven things you can do to build project relationships that transcend cultural differences (and significantly boost your chances of success).
As a project manager, it was difficult enough getting a bunch of people who were in the same room, spoke the same language and grew up in the same country to get on the same page. Now practically every project seems to be spread over two or three continents and four or more time zones. Welcome to project management in the 21st century global village!
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Why Schedules Are Always Late and What to Do About It
Five reasons your projects always seem to be late, and five things you can do to make this one different.
When is the very first moment that you know a project will be late? For most projects, it's day one. My first project management text book proclaimed "A well run project takes from 50 to 100% more time to complete than predicted, and poorly run projects require two to three times as long as planned."
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Being Heard Above the Communication Blizzard
Are your key project communications getting lost in the avalanche? Try these suggestions for climbing out of the drift.
Is there any project manager among us who doesn't have a big old stack of email in his in-basket, a giant pile of unread documents on his desk, and an incessantly flashing "message waiting" light on his voice mail? Paper information is typically "filed" geologically, heaped layer by layer upon the pile until critical project documents are found somewhere in the Mesozoic Era.
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Fearless Project Leadership
As the project leader, PMs absolutely MUST tell execs how it really is. Kimberly outlines how to do it, fearlessly.
From the project kick-off, where the project leader may not even be involved, to the attempted premature launch of a less-than-ready-to-ship product, projects run a higgily-piggily route. This real-world path rarely resembles the neat, tidy, well-defined process described in the PMBOK®.
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