Those 4 cornerstones are Coding, Testing, Listening and Designing. This is what is said about listening:

«You have to learn what the problem is in the first place, then you have to learn what numbers to put in the tests. You probably won’t know this yourself, so you have to get good at listening to clients - users, managers, and business people»

For sure, when project teams use SCRUM approaches, approaches that consist in having 30 minutes meetings to adjust the work EVERY SINGLE DAY, there is a lot of listening going own, not only from the project-team manager/leader but from EVERYONE. Since in Agile, the team accepts to collectively be accountable for the results, listening, but also the whole function of COMMUNICATION, is the business of EVERYBODY. In fact, in a SCRUM setting, those meetings-conversations are at the center of the management process; they are even the whole of the management process in many instances.

I imagine that similar comments apply to the LAST PLANNER System,with which you are more familiar than me. From what I understand, one of its main features implies listening to the last planners (those who do the work) BEFORE we start anything (as opposed to asking for suggestions when it is already too late in the execution of a plan that was developped in isolation and imposed without consultation)

Listening has my vote as a major key success factor of project management. It is even a pre-condition to planning, for without proper listening, your initial planning will only be unshared wishful thinking and, furthermore, you won’t be able to adjust it when the real world confronts you during execution.

Amen

So much of our attention in project management is on the tangible aspects: contracts, budget, schedules, activities, tasks, materiel, methods, etc. Too often we fail to put the humanness of projects front and center.

How often have we encountered projects in trouble and the team members know what to do to fix it, but those actions are not being taken? Each time I’ve encountered that situation I’ve also run into a project manager who doesn’t listen.

Listening is one of the foundational skills of project managers. Without a high level of competence at listenting projects are doomed to drift. Given the general characterization by wives that husbands don’t listen, anytime we have project managers who are men we have a potential breakdown.

So…for anyone recruiting/selecting project maangers find a way to assess their competence and openness of listening. The success of your projects depends on it.

Take care,
Eli.