Documenting Project Manager challenges

Do you believe in coincidence? Do you believe in the law of attraction? Whatever you believe in, the stars aligned this morning as I serendipitously studied the Sunday morning paper

I am working day and night at the moment on a series of articles for the the SNEC-PMI newsletter to offer solutions that help Project Managers be more effective in the real world. After we have studied the nice, neat, Pollyanna case studies for our certifications, then we usually find that the real world of project management is a tad different.

For example, in theory, a project manager gets all the appropriate documents signed by the appropriate stakeholders and then we happily go off to lunch. In the real world, people don't get back to you, are out of the office or have been abducted by aliens. Who knows what all goes wrong, but the fact is that it is hard to get some people to respond to your emails.

I am obviously not the only project manager with these challenges in the real world. Here is what Dilbert shares in today's Sunday paper: