Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. Recently I saw a comment in one of my posts in one of my episodes and someone wrote this We want the project status now and we better like what we hear. And this person said, Ricardo, how do you build trust? How do you build trust? Because if I read this again and say, we want the status now and we want to like what we hear, you know, first. A project status is not a document to generate happiness. Uh, to generate happiness maybe you go to a football match, or maybe you go to a basketball or a concert. You know, you go to a restaurant, you listen to some music. Projets are real things and real things, they come with good news and not so good news. And one thing that I said probably a hundred times is that project is not easy and it's not easy at all. If projects were easy, we don't need project manager. We don't need anything. We just do it, right. We we spend all this effort thinking it's because the chances of things going wrong are high, very high. And trust is when you are open and honest in your communication with the stakeholders. And I'm saying I'm not saying that you should communicate in a pessimistic way. For example, I like to call myself a cautious optimistic.
Every time someone asks me anything, I say I'm cautious, optimistic. I'm optimistic. I think things can be good. Things can be nice. But I'm not blind on the odd side. And why I'm saying this, for example, when we see now a lot of people are coming to me and saying, Ricardo, Oh, this is fantastic about the PMOtto and the tool you are generating. This is so nice. And this probably most of the answers I put, it's something like, Thank you very much, but we are only doing the first step. There is still a long road to go. There's still a lot of things to do. Our aim is clear, but it's not easy because if it was easy, every single human being will build a chat bot to generate project management information. Every one, every single of us will do that. It's hard. We are working hard on that. But we need to be honest because if you are not honest, you will frustrate people's expectation. You will, for example, another example. I have some friends and some people that advise me on marketing and this they said, Ricardo, you should start selling your courses before they get ready. For example, I'm developing a course that is maybe ten lessons. When I have three of them, I can start selling it.
I said, No, I cannot do that because if I do something like that, I will destroy my reputation. If for any reason I could not deliver the seven remaining chapters or lessons. This is why, for example, I only sell when it's ready. For example, a lot of people, including investors, ask me why you don't start selling subscription of PMOtto. I said, no, because it's it's not ready. It's not ready. If people pay for that and things are not what they expect. I will not only I would say damage, I would say financially because people will cancel, but I will damage, you know, the perception they have of my work. This is why, for example, we had the beta and we are turning the beta very slowly because it's not perfect yet. It's not what we want yet. We are working towards making this. And look, this is the same feeling I had when I saw Apple Vision in early June. When when Apple sorry, when Apple released the the Apple Vision, I thought the first thing I thought I'd say, oh, my God. I would love to see this in my hands because this has so many variables, has so many cutting edge technology that to put everything together for early 2024 will be an incredible feature of competence from Apple. And Apple is evaluated at $3 trillion.
Imagine the amount of money they have and the risks. So imagine you now doing your project in your company. So why would you, you know, fake a perception that does not exist. Why you don't work on building reliable relationships with your stakeholders by saying, Look, this is challenging. We are facing this challenge and that challenge. The best project managers I have ever worked in my life they have a brutal sense of honesty. If things are not working, they just say it. They they don't hide. They don't try to to disappear. They just go in front of everyone and say, look, this is not working and we work to fix it. And this is what is expected from an ethical and diligent project manager. How do you build trust? Trust. And this is what will make you a successful project manager. Think always about that because we live today in a world that is so crazy that every body thinks everything that nobody knows what is really going on, that I need to encourage all of you to be as honest as you can. And honest and and trust does not mean to be negative. Does not mean to be pessimistic. Think always about that. Enjoy your week. Have a very positive one and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
