A retrospective on 2022 – my top five posts on leadership and delivery

As I’ve done in past years, I like to review the articles I’ve written over the year and share the ones which were read the most.

2022 was the first year since I started blogging when I took a hiatus of more than a couple of weeks. While I was able to write a few articles in the late Summer based on my municipal election campaign, the overall number of articles this year was less than in previous years.

Here are the top five articles based on views from my personal blog site.

1. Even though the phenomenon of Quiet Quitting has existed for as long as people have been working (I’m sure there was a caveperson going through the motions of hunting for prehistoric buffalo but whose heart wasn’t really in it!), it joined the unholy triad of the Great Resignation and Quiet Firing to generate a lot of press. Little surprise then that Are your team members “quiet quitting”? was number one on the most read list.
2. After moving to Welland which doesn’t have quite the same sport scene as a major metropolitan city like Toronto, I rekindled my enjoyment in the game of baseball. Our team, the Welland Jackfish, placed very well in the regular season standings but was unfortunately eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. I am hopeful that 2023 will bring the championship to Welland. Watching their games inspired me to write Project management lessons from the old ball game.
3. A chronic challenge faced by project managers in many of the companies I’ve worked for or consulted with is that rather than spending the majority of their time on high value, strategic activities such as effective managing stakeholder engagement or dealing with emerging risks, they are busy filling out forms and reports. So no wonder that Are your PMs drowning in paperwork? was a popular read.
4. Project management theory tells us that a charter or something equivalent is required to authorize a project’s existence. Of course, real world practice varies widely which is why I wrote Are you Batman? If not, get a real charter!
5. When we learn about common techniques to reduce project durations, fast tracking and crashing are often the first two which come to mind. Scope reduction, however, is often a safer and cheaper alternative. While it may not be applicable in all cases, it is worth investigating the option of Do less, finish earlier.

While it was not in my readers’ top five, I’d like to close out 2022’s final article (which will be published in early January 2023) with a challenge for those of you who are making New Year’s resolutions as well as those of you who run retrospectives or similar improvement ideation events: Why hold retrospectives if ideas don’t get implemented?

I hope all of my readers enjoy a peaceful, prosperous, and healthy 2023!

(If you liked this article, why not read my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores).