Here’s what was happening on Undocumented Features for the third week of August 2007:
PM-Fu:  Organizational Planning when using Matrix-based Project Management
Great article.  Long title.  We’ve improved on that.  :)

Management Magic 101- How to Delegate Well

The Self-Project: Simplifying Your To-Do Lists To Get More Done

PMing on the cheap: OpenProj free PM software

Always Strive for the Best! (and Never Get Anything Done)

PM-Fu: Keep Your Eye On The Ball

And that, folks, was the first week of UF on the new blog.  Enjoy! 

Before going for a formal presentation, work on relationships first. Try to meet and know, or at least know about, all of the key players that you are presenting to. Don’t forget the ‘secondary’ players either. It is very seldom that anyone on the client side is invited to a presentation by accident. Usually, these folks are trusted advisors. Being armed with some knowledge of these people will help you build a better presentation.

If you cannot manage to meet and start a relationship of credibility with the audience beforehand, try to find someone with whom you have credibility who also has a relationship with the audience and ask that person to lead the meeting. Their introduction and testimonial will help to establish some level of credibility for you. If the audience trusts your meeting leader, and she establishes that she trusts you, then in turn you have gained an opportunity to be trusted as well. It’s just like meeting a new circle of friends when you go to a party with a friend- if you’re good enough for their friend who brought you, then you have a foot in the door.

Some of this information here is elementary, but nevertheless it’s important and should never be forgotten. Credibility is easy to build if you know how, but it is also amazingly easy to destroy, and once destroyed, nearly impossible to rebuild.

Step one to motivating people is understanding them.  It’s also step one for managing them, dealing with them, handling their problems, and a million other interactions.

That leads me to this amazing article, which although it may seem to simplify things greatly, does a great job of summarizing the bulk of how people think, what motivates them, and how you can better understand them.  Learn these and live by them.  It’ll be a great help.

 I have succeeded in making friends online before, but generally through chat rooms.  I’m too interactive of a person by nature to manage to make friends just by reading their interests, posting, responding to posts, etc.  To me, the whole social networking venue just didn’t work.

 Finally, though, based on the recommendations of many people that it would help my blog, my career, my life, I would help cure cancer, etc., I joined LinkedIn.  I went in, filled out their data forms, wondering all the while why I was going to share this stuff with strangers.  I looked over my profile.  I clicked around.  I found more things to fill out.  Eventually, I decided it was time to see if I actually knew anyone here, and started trying the search function.

 And then, I learned something.  I learned where past colleagues were that I had lost contact with.  A lot of them.  Some of them were doing insteresting new things.  I got back in touch.  I had lunch with a few.  I learned where more friends and colleagues were.  I learned important things. 

One friend was in management with a big offshoring firm.  I learned a lot of valuable information from him, information that led me to understand that my firm was not ready to offshore, and what steps we would need to take in order to consider it.  From another friend, I discussed his growing pains of transitioning to a new job as a business analyst- and as I thought about it and helped him, it helped me work out key training and processes we were lacking in our company that we needed to help us improve.

As a side effect, of course, it has helped me be better known on the web and promoted my blog- neither one of which hurts at all. Googling myself and actually seeing something about me, not some other Stacey Douglas, on the first page of the results is rather good for the old ego.

The lesson here are many:

1.  Social networking makes catching up with others and keeping up with others easy.

2.  Networking with others in general really is a valuable learning tool- do take the time to do it.

3.  A little self-promotion is good for the ego.  It never hurts.

4. Most importantly, friends are valuable.  I also learned that I had missed out on several marriages, children, happy memories of friends.  Keeping in touch is good for the soul- and we work to have personal lives, not the other way around, right?

This article over at Wired magazine is about four folks in your office that you should spend the time to get to know.  Getting to know them may take up a bit of time, but in the long run, it’ll help you.  I would suggest six other people as well:  your company’s benefits administrator, payroll processor, expense report processor, supply room clerk, and phone guy, email administrator.  The first three are obvious:  they help you with all the little things that get you paid.  When there’s trouble with this, it will *always* be a distraction.  The supply room clerk can help you at those times when you’re trying to pull together special projects:  you need extra binders for a training class, need a big print job handled, and other special projects.  The phone specialist and email administrator are your lifelines- a PM lives and dies by communication.  Knowing these two folks personally can help you when the chips are down.  The email admin is especially useful, at those times when you need to get a file to a client that’s way over your mail systems’ limits, but has to be there for an RFP deadline, for example.