Ciprian Cucu

Project Management Professional (PMP®), Trainer, Entrepreneur, Business Developer

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

A fancy title never made anyone capable of running a PMO. No PMO? Nobody owns delivery discipline. Got one and still struggling? A function is only as good as the person running it. Sound like your org? Save this or send me a message.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

You don't have a reporting problem. You have a discipline problem. Most tools build the report in minutes. What they can't do is log your day for you. Skip it all week, no tool saves you from the Friday scramble. Is your reporting a habit, or a scramble?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Every team says they're in crisis mode. Most have been for years. Being good under pressure means having a system before the pressure hits. If you're staffed and still struggling every time, that's not a people problem. Is your team in crisis, or is that just normal now?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Tools change overnight. People don't. Change has 3 parts: tools, process, people. Most orgs nail the first two and skip the third. Then leaders wonder why nobody has drive. What's the last people-step your org skipped?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Chasing people for status updates is PMO stone age. It's also the slowest way to build business acumen. Cross-functional projects force you to learn the business fast, or fail in front of everyone. What built your business acumen? Rarely a classroom.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Being a great trainer has a hard ceiling. It's called "good." When leadership sells the "why" first, everything shifts. Czech Republic, Slovakia, 3 travel days. The workshops were the easy part. What's the last "why" you skipped before asking for buy-in?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Padding your estimate is the same move as padding any budget: avoiding a fight you don't want to have.

"2 weeks, assuming the vendor delivers on time. If it slips, add 1 week." Now you're arguing the assumption, not the number.

What did you last bury inside a number?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Nobody starting as a Scrum Master starts from zero. Most were already doing half the job.

Per https://t.co/zsRStv8buZ's 2019 report, ~31% come from project management, 25% from dev.

What's stopping you, the skill gap or the title?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

I look for 2 things before I say yes to a project: a sponsor willing to change, a team willing to work.

Everything else, I can handle. A checked-out sponsor, I can't.

If you've worked around one, what was the first sign?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

People have been doing projects forever. Doing them properly is a different story.

Doing projects and doing them properly aren't the same skill. That gap is where most delivery problems start.

Where did you first learn the difference?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Every barrier I hit early in my career turned out to be fake.

What built real confidence wasn't a certification or a bigger number. It was doing the work itself.

What's the bar you're still waiting to clear?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Some leaders don't want honest feedback. They want a yes-machine that happens to be human.

Do you want validation in your next meeting, or the truth, said well enough that you can use it?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Stop waiting for the right time to fix delivery. It's never coming.

The urgent thing isn't a phase you pass through, it's the permanent weather.

What's the "but" you've been repeating, and what happens if you swap it for "while" tomorrow?

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

3 weeks into the PMI PMO-CP, and the tool changing how I think isn't a template. It's a diagnostic lens called the PMO Value Ring.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Most people think Agile means you stop planning. It means you stop trusting a plan you haven't touched in a month.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

A reactive sponsor spends Monday finding out what went wrong last week. A proactive one spends it deciding what could go wrong next.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Most training budgets aren't spent to change behavior. They're spent to prove something was done.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

Training doesn't stick because the content was good. It sticks because someone scheduled a 15-minute check-in 2 weeks later.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

The riskiest moment in most projects isn't a missed deadline. It's the sentence: I assumed someone else had that.

[Ciprian Cucu @CiprianCucu]

A launch has an end date. Maintenance doesn't, until the new way of working survives without anyone checking on it.