People and Projects Podcast: Project Management Podcast · Andy Kaufman, PMP, PMI-ACP

PPP 502 | When Process Is Not Enough: The Human Side of Project Leadership, with Brett Harned

·44 min·2 clips

Brett Harned says to slow conversations down before speeding up the work, name what's happening out loud, and assume positive intent.

1. People and Projects Podcast episode 502 examines why tools and templates fall short in project management, centering on the human side of leading projects, with AI as a late-episode topic. 2. Host Andy interviews Brett Harned, founder of the Digital PM Community and Digital PM Summit, author of Project Management for Humans, and a coach and consultant who now runs Same Team's PM Squad. 3. Brett's thesis is that projects fail "because conversations didn't happen or they happened way too late," so facilitating conversations matters more than any tool or process. 4. He recounts falling into project management when a recruiter had to explain the role, then building a perfect plan early in his career and watching a project fail because nobody felt safe raising concerns. 5. He argues that PM is a leadership role organizations don't treat as one, noting a path from junior PM to senior PM, manager, COO, or CEO, while PMs quietly carry emotional labor by "translating," "buffering," and "smoothing things." 6. For messy projects he recommends slowing conversations down before speeding up the work, naming what's happening out loud, and assuming positive intent, such as pausing when two stakeholders seem to say the same thing but don't. 7. When work drifts he asks "what do we think that we agreed to?", and Andy adds that percent complete and status colors are "insufficient" because they miss things people don't feel safe to say. 8. Brett recalls a conference speaker who said that if you call people resources, "they have every right to call you overhead," and says COVID made it easier for people to check out and harder for PMs to gauge how teams feel. 9. On AI, he says it is "great at admin" but "can't read the room," and he uses it for agendas, meeting summaries, show notes from transcripts, tone checks on stakeholder emails, and as a thinking partner, treating it like an intern. 10. Project managers, team leads, and operations leaders who handle people friction will get the most from it.

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