This podcast is part a published article on The Digital Project Manager. You can read the entire article here.
Audio Transcription:
Ben Aston:
Thank you for listening to the Digital Manager Podcast. Clarizen, a leader in enterprise portfolio and project management software, brought this Podcast to you. Clarizen.com is a great place to start your search.
We spend a lot time talking about project initiation and how to kick our projects. But, finishing projects can be just as challenging because everyone is interested in it, everyone’s enthusiastic about it, everyone’s buzzed about it, but by the end everyone has lost their enthusiasm and isn’t feeling so positive anymore.
If we don’t take care, we can become lazy and sloppy. We can stop caring, and our team may stop caring. The client will keep asking for more. If we don’t get it right, we could end up missing important details, going over budget, pissing on our team, pissing of the client, or not learning anything from the project. We can lose a lot of value if we let our feet off the gas at the end.
Today, I’m speaking with Patrice. We’ll discuss how to make projects more successful. We’ll go over a checklist of things to do and not do that will help you end your projects with momentum and prepare yourself for the next one. So hi Patrice.
Patrice Embry
Hello.
Ben Aston:
It’s been a few weeks since our last conversation, but can you tell us anything? I’m sure you know something exciting that happened recently to you. You’ve just returned from your road trip adventure. Would you recommend road trips to others?
Patrice Embry
Road trips are for people who like driving and enjoy looking at the same thing for a long time. If you’re going through larger states, I recommend it. But we drove from my home outside of Philadelphia to Colorado Springs. We drove through Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Indiana. After dinner in Chicago, we went to Iowa for lunch. Then we drove all the way to South Dakota. We stayed a night in Wyoming, then flew to Colorado. After so much driving, no one ever wants to see another car again.
I don’t think I’ve really left the house since Friday.
Ben Aston:
Good stuff. Good stuff. What was the most hilarious thing that happened in all of this time? It could have been something funny or something terrible?
Patrice Embry
It’s hilarious and it’s also disastrous. We wanted to see Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore. That was one of the reasons we traveled as far north as possible. They are very close to one another, beautiful monuments, things people aspired to see when they grow up in the U.S. And the day that we had to do this was a complete fog, white-out.
It was impossible to see anything. Literally nothing. It was not even like, oh, you could see the shape of it but you can’t really see everything. We drove to them anyway in the hope that the fog would lift. It didn’t. It’s still on my bucket list, and I don’t know if it will ever be done again. It might not be possible for me.
Ben Aston:
This is what happens when you have a special plan that fails? That’s disappointing.
Patrice Embry
There are nice gift shops, however.
Ben Aston:
Very nice, very nice.
Tell us, now that you’re back home from your epic road trip, which projects are you currently working on? What are you working on this summer?
Patrice Embry
I have a little bit of everything.
