How To Grow Business Acumen and Business Awareness as a Project Manager (PODCAST)

Do You Have Business Awareness

Are you aware of your business? Do you know what’s going on in your industry?

I was recently interviewed by Cornelius Fichtner from The Project Management Podcast about The Growing Business Acumen and Business Awareness as a Project Manager.

Here`s a listening guide to some of the key points and tips covered in the episode:

• 2:20: 4 reasons project managers should care about business awareness
• 04:00 – how I use business awareness in financial industry projects
• 05:30 – how to balance project delivery with business awareness
• 06:25 – how to build foundation skills in business awareness
• 07:45 – using the NEWS strategy to understand the external environment
• 09:30 – discover decision making patterns inside your organization
• 11:30 – how the organization’s financial health impacts project manager’s health
• 12:45 – why the projects you choose to work on impact your project management career
• 14:00 – business awareness includes understanding your competitors (including “non-traditional” competitors)
• 16:30: how to borrow ideas from other industries to boost innovation
• 17:00 – the quick and easy way to identify best practices in any industry and grow your awareness
• 18:00 – the limitations of traditional risk management and how to overcome it
• 19:30 – how to make business awareness an ongoing habit and improve your project procurement as a result
• 20:00 – how business awareness improves your ability to network with executives
• 21:00 – what are the online tools and resources (free and paid) you can use to boost your business awareness
• 29:00 – using the “rule of 20” to guide your networking efforts

Play Now:

If you are a regular listener to The PM Podcast then you heard me say on many occasions that projects are the mechanism by which companies turn their vision and strategy into a reality. And it is us — the project managers — who are asked to bring these projects to a successful completion so that the business needs are met.

This means that we project managers need a great deal of business acumen and business awareness. But many of us are accidental project managers, who at some point in our career found ourselves to be quite shockingly thrust into the position of a project leader. We were taken by surprise back when that happened and now they suddenly tell us that we also need all this awareness?

Well, fear not because Bruce Harpham is here to tell you how to grow your business know-how as a project manager. In this interview we review what foundational skills you need, how to access internal business knowledge from your organization and how to look for information and trends in the broader environment outside the four walls of your company.

Our goal is to help you grow the situational awareness that you need day after day on your projects by adding business awareness.

About The PM Podcast: Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is a project management trainer who helps his students with their PMP Exam prep, and since 2005 he has published hundreds of interviews with project managers from around the world. The interviews are free on http://www.project-management-podcast.com/free.

Would you like to hear more podcast interviews? Check out the links below to find a few of the other interviews I’ve done:

• Podcast Interview: How to Make Remote Work Productive (The Project Management Podcast)
• The Career Advancement Toolkit (PM Chats)
• Career Success Hacks for Project Managers with Bruce Harpham (The People & Projects Podcast)
• Four Key Insights To Earning $100,000 Per Year in Your Engineering Career (The Engineering Career Coach Podcast)