Kimberly Wiefling

Kimberly Wiefling is the author of one of the top project management books in the US, "Scrappy Project Management - The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces", and the founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC, a scrappy global consulting enterprise committed to enabling her clients to achieve highly unlikely or darn near impossible results, predictably and repeatedly. Her work focuses on keynote speaking and workshops on practical and sensible business leadership and project/program management scaled for the size of the company and the project. She has worked with companies of all sizes, including one-person ventures and those in the Fortune 500, and she has helped to launch and grow more than half a dozen startups, a few of which are reaping excellent profits at this very moment. She spends about half of her time working with Japan-based companies that are committed to developing truly global leaders. Kimberly holds a B.S. in Chemistry and Physics from Wright State University and a M.S. in Physics from Case Institute. She spent 10 years at HP working in product development project management and engineering leadership. She worked with several startups, including a Xerox Parc spinoff where she was the VP of Program Management. In 2001 she launched her consulting practice and never looked back. She holds a certificate in project management through UC Santa Cruz Extension, where she is an instructor in the Project and Program Management Certificate Program. Kimberly spends about half of her time facilitating leadership, communication and execution excellence workshops for leaders of Japanese companies committed to becoming truly global. Thousands of people have viewed the hysterical video documenting the final phase of completing her book at www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDCJBu3rdvk. You can reach her via email at kimberly@wiefling.com

Making Your Message Memorable

Making Your Message Memorable

For years I’ve been using a rubber chicken in my consulting work to burn into people’s consciousness the concepts of personal accountability and a belief in an internal locus of control. Holding the chicken at shoulder height, I release it and ask why the chicken fell to the floor. Victims blame gravity. (Some people even blame [...]

Take a Shot of Scrappiness and Call Me in the Morning

Take a Shot of Scrappiness and Call Me in the Morning

I’m delighted to post this story on behalf of Emily, who sent it to me as evidence that she was becoming more scrappy. In this story Emily shows us how we can help our teams think things through and clarify goals by asking good questions and facilitating discussions that people are “too busy” to have [...]

Systems Thinking 4: Complex, Not Complicated

Systems Thinking 4: Complex, Not Complicated

On a recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I spotted a whole mess of geese flying overhead, so I quickly snapped some shots with my iPhone. Here’s one of the pictures I took. Geese flying in their famous “V” formation have always fascinated me. When I see geese flying together like this I wonder [...]

Systems Thinking 3: Can We Learn From Insects?

Systems Thinking 3: Can We Learn From Insects?

Studying chaos, complexity, and non-linear systems has taught me that control is an illusion – and sometimes completely unnecessary. Complicated outcomes need not be the result of complicated processes, or tight-fisted control, as Dr. Stephen Wolfram illustrated in his combination door-stop/book “A New Kind of Science” some years ago (available to read for free online). [...]

Systems Thinking 2: Activity=Progress

Systems Thinking 2: Activity=Progress

The recent economic woes, and accompanying 10% official unemployment rate, have a lot of my friends looking for work. Down-sized, right-sized, cap-sized, some are entering their job search emotionally ill-equipped for the journey ahead. The job search process is discouraging, I think primarily because the task of getting a new job is 0% complete until [...]

Systems Thinking 1: Wholeness, Not Parts

Systems Thinking 1: Wholeness, Not Parts

Long before I knew what “it” was, I was doing “it” – systems thinking, that is. I’ve been thinking and writing about a bunch of topics related to this methodology for the past couple of months, and see no reason to break the streak for this week’s series of blogs, so here goes. Systems thinking [...]

Dear Diary #4 – The Fortune’s in the Follow Up

Dear Diary #4 - The Fortune's in the Follow Up

Dear Diary – Well, it’s been quite a week.  After 7 days of heightened attention on my interpersonal communication skills I can’t say I feel I’ve made much progress.  Aside from some encouraging email from a few friends cheering me on in my (decades old) quest to improve myself, there’s no indication that a complete [...]

Dear Diary #3 – Conjuring Action

Dear Diary #3 - Conjuring Action

Dear Diary – In the “Dear Diary #2” blog I made a commitment to re-engineer my relationship with my dad – getting unstuck from the past conversation swirling around in my head about him.  (Perhaps you made a similar commitment to doing that with a colleague or boss after reading that blog?)  After recognizing that [...]

Dear Diary #2 – Dad, Can You Spare Some Change?

Dear Diary #2 - Dad, Can You Spare Some Change?

Dear Diary – Well, I might have gone overboard with my focus on possibility thinking and commitment to action in conversations…  So far this week I’ve envisioned 3 outrageous breakthroughs for myself, arm-twisted 7 friends or relatives to swear an oath to manifesting their own ridiculous goals, and committed myself to a half dozen preposterous [...]

Dear Diary #1 – Thanks for the Dish Towel

Dear Diary #1 - Thanks for the Dish Towel

Dear Diary – For Christmas one of my closest friends gave me a dish towel that says “Being unstable and b-tchy is just part of my mystique.”  Knowing that there is truth in sarcasm, and understanding the importance of good communication skills and positive relationships to project success, I’ve decided to recommit myself to improving [...]

Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing

Key success behavior #5:  “Do the right thing”, really wraps a pretty bow around all of the previous blogs on this topic this past week, and a great many more critical leadership behaviors that I haven’t mentioned at all.  Although incomplete, all together I think the five are an impressive list: Keep Your Promises Don’t [...]

Don’t Play the Victim

Don't Play the Victim

This is an extension of my last blog about “Don’t Blame Others”.  Today I am not only urging you not to blame other people – don’t play the victim by blaming anything at all for your problems and failures.  For many years I thought that my troubles were caused by external forces.  My career didn’t [...]

My Bad!

My Bad!

Key success behavior #3:  Don’t blame others.  It’s not that other people aren’t responsible for a lot of the crap that you have to clean up as a project leader.  It’s just that blaming them doesn’t help fix the situation, and worse – it diminishes your personal power.  I have continued to lead projects only [...]

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Well, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, but I’m sorry to say I felt the need to put this one out there as one of the keys to success as a project leader. Key success behavior #2:  Don’t Lie.  I recently had lunch with someone who’d been lied to by her manager [...]

Keep Your Promises

Keep Your Promises

In honor of summer, I’m going to keep this week’s series of blogs bite-sized so you can get back to your beach and margaritas lickity split.  This week I’ll review a few behaviors that are key to success as a project leader. Key success behavior #1:  Keep your promises.  Sorry if this seems trivial.  I [...]

What Do Leaders Think When They Make a Mistake?

What Do Leaders Think When They Make a Mistake?

A while back Lisa Winter wrote a terrific blog about what leaders say when they make a mistake . . . “I’m sorry.” Her blog prompted me to explore a question.  What do leaders think when they make a mistake?  When I was a kid I was deathly afraid of making mistakes.  My dad was [...]

Commitment – Inspiration that Never Fails

Commitment - Inspiration that Never Fails

Inspiration is important, but we can’t depend on it showing up when needed.  It comes and goes, like a ferral cat who roams looking for a bite to eat.  We can feel inspiration waxing and waning within us, and the inspiration from the outside world can’t be counted upon to show up on a regular [...]

Money Doesn’t Inspire

Money Doesn't Inspire

Some people in the corporate world still believe that people work for money.  But with a growing number of examples of people doing all kinds of work for free, it’s getting more difficult to adhere to that view.  Take Wikipedia, for example.  According to Wikinomics, by Tapscott & Williams, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in [...]

The Politics of Inspiration and Shame

The Politics of Inspiration and Shame

As a project leader, part of your job is to inspire people to persevere in pursuit of seemingly impossible goals.  In my work, it’s not part of my job . . . that’s pretty much all I do.  A decade leading projects was the perfect preparation for this work.  Lately I’ve been spending about half [...]

No Oxygen at the Top: Project Management Challenges at the Everest of Organizations

No Oxygen at the Top: Project Management Challenges at the Everest of Organizations

If you’ve ever been inside of a tin of sardines you will have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to ride the subways of Tokyo during rush hour – only in the subway the sardines are still alive.  Even though we are packed together with greater intimacy than most sexual encounters, my inscrutable [...]

Wicked Problems

Wicked Problems

“Wicked Problem” is a label given to a problem that is basically a giant incomprehensible hairball of contradictions and complexity. Personally, I don’t feel prepared to do anything more than dabble in solving these gargantuan challenges. Governments, heads of state, and the United Nations tackle these kinds of things. For example, here’s a list of [...]