In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the common problem of project backlogs that grow instead of shrinking. He offers three practical tips for managing them effectively: (1) Accept that your backlog will never be empty. (2) Prioritize tasks through “radical prioritization,” focusing only on what really matters and delegating or discarding the rest. (3) Control what goes into the backlog, using a “parking lot” for ideas that may not be immediately essential. Ricardo emphasizes the complexity of projects and the importance of making strategic decisions to avoid unnecessary tasks in the project.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

In this episode, Ricardo talks about the importance of understanding the political aspects of project management. Effective project delivery isn't just about planning, budgeting, risk analysis, or stakeholder management; it requires the management of human interactions and political dynamics. Ricardo gives four main tips: influence mapping to understand authentic relationships beyond organizational charts, using political intelligence to read unspoken signals, strategic commitment to protect the central elements of the project, and maintaining ethics in political maneuvers. He points out that mastery of political awareness comes from practical experience, not just theoretical learning, and is crucial to successful project management.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

This week, Ricardo discusses using "Squads" within projects and gives tips on building and sustaining effective teams.

The modern use of the term "Squad" in project management can be traced back to a military concept in which a multidisciplinary team acts independently to complete a series of missions.

This idea of a cross-functional and autonomous team became the core support of agile models that originated in software development and has since been extended to other types of projects. Currently, you can find Squads in many different delivery methods.

Ricardo stresses the importance of teamwork, time-zone, and open lines of communication for the Squad's success.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the connection between Chaotic Systems and the behavior of risks in the project.

Chaotic systems are highly disordered and unpredictable, where minor changes in initial parameters cause drastic changes in the future.

Consider the global shipping crisis. COVID-19 caused some ports worldwide to close during the pandemic, resulting in an insane search for available containers on one side of the globe while thousands of empty containers are filling ports on the other side of the planet. According to some experts, correcting this mismatch can take months, if not years.

However, not all chaotic systems are the same. Some chaotic systems just happen, and you have little control over them, such as the weather forecast for the next two or three days. These are chaotic systems of level 1.

LLevel 2 systems are the epiphany of chaos. These systems change by the simple fact that you start measuring them. A good example is the stock market. If there were a perfect algorithm that predicted a stock's price would rise tomorrow with 100% certainty, the stock price would not rise tomorrow but today due to increased demand for that stock.

Another example we all faced two years ago happened when toilet paper disappeared from the counter of stores in the early days of a pandemic. These events are called a level 2 chaotic system, and no one knows where it began. The more people measure, act or intervene, the more chaotic it becomes...

Our challenge today is that everything we do is at level 2 chaos, necessitating a different set of skills and adaptability.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

This week Ricardo discusses the impact of inflation on the project risks.

In the past, countries with weak economies were more likely to experience inflation; however, today, countries with stronger economies, like those in Europe, are experiencing relevant impacts of inflation.

The ability to complete projects may be heavily impacted by inflation, which presents a significant issue for project managers.

Depending on where the project is, it may even be required to consider if it is feasible to move forward.

Regarding this scenario, Ricardo offers three suggestions for risk mitigation that can be applied in the early stages of the project and another three suggestions to be applied in later stages.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the difficulty faced by those overqualified for a given position.

When a company creates a position for a new team member and receives a resume with qualifications much in excess of those needed, this CV is most likely not going to be chosen.

A highly competent candidate for the job may be financially motivated and use the company as a stepping stone or may rapidly lose interest in their work, according to the employer's perspective.

Considering the high costs of training the professional, the company will not invest in a person who apparently will not stay there for a long time.

Ricardo offers three suggestions on what to do in this circumstance.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

#team, #resource-management, #overqualification

In this week's episode, Ricardo addresses the Passion Economy. There is a "passion economy" when you make money doing something you enjoy.

The biggest illustration of this notion is the digital influencer, who may share information, expertise, and insights about a topic they find fascinating and monetize the content through a YouTube or TikTok channel, for example.

However, the process is not as simple as most people believe. The majority of the "rockstars" of the passion economy represent a minuscule portion of the market. And transforming the passion into results takes time and a lot of effort.

As Adam Davidson's book The Passion Economy examines in depth, your efforts to create money from a passion may not always provide the anticipated results.

To understand more and relate it to your project and innovation efforts, listen to this week's #5minpodcast.

In this week's episode, Ricardo addresses the risks of the Diderot Effect.

For many, this effect is directly related to consumption bias. However, it is perfectly applied also when we add something to our project, and that something triggers a series of new features causing control to be completely lost. This effect impacts budget, deadlines, and team, among many other factors.

It's like consumption; when we buy an outfit, it sometimes emphasizes that the shoe is not so new. With that, we bought an entire garment due to the trigger of the first purchase.

Ricardo gives three tips on not falling into this Diderot effect trap.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Project Management in Agribusiness.

He explains how we can apply project management in this segment, which is so different for many of us.

Ricardo comments that agribusiness is transforming as powerful as the technology area, using digitalization, georeferencing e technology, and project to select crops that will be used in this area.

For example, the harvest of an agricultural product can be considered a project, as it is temporary and unique due to environmental, soil, and local conditions.

And project management will identify, for example, market, environmental, and price volatility risks that may occur depending on the type of harvest.

Agribusiness project management can also be used in logistics to distribute products and grains. Ricardo gives examples of global impact in this logistics, such as the distribution of grains in Ukraine contained in the Odesa port due to the war.

Another example is Brazil itself, a significant producer of agricultural products, with a continental dimension where the logistics of getting the products to the port is a great challenge.

Ricardo also talks about the agile approaches that are used by businesses that are born around agribusiness.

Finally, Ricardo comments on a project for grain flow using the river network, which is a doctoral thesis of a friend in Portugal and a project to support the sustainable planting of olive trees for olive oil in Morocco that was carried out during the period in which he led the project area at UNOPS (United Nations)

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Law of Diminishing Returns applied to the effort we make to manage projects.

We often doubt how much management is worth, and we try to simplify management as much as possible to avoid bureaucracy when we spend a lot of time in meetings or filling out documents and templates without reaching any results.

Ricardo explains that according to the law of diminishing returns, the project's results will improve with the increase in a management capacity. But we must find an optimal management level that maximizes results, not paper production.

We often create a more bureaucratic control process with more effort due to a paranoia we have with risks and a perception that everything needs to be controlled. With this, we reach a point of diminishing returns, where we spend more to have less.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to find out more!

In this week's podcast, Ricardo talks about leadership and followership and the paranoia of today's society to exclusively focus on leadership.

This episode reflects on questions like:

Is being a leader the only essential profile for a company?

How is the followership in this equation?

Don't we all have to develop skills to lead and to be led too?

Can a job be done only with leaders?

Who will perform the work within a structure or project that will be led?

What are the characteristics of followers who are the foundation of your company?

Listen to the episode, and participate in the discussion of these issues, allowing space for reflection on what is fundamental to developing effective work teams.

In this week's podcast, Ricardo talks about negotiation and how it is inserted into our daily lives far beyond buying and selling relationships.

He talks about negotiation steps and how we often make mistakes when skipping important phases of this process.

The initial exchange of information, the offer, the counter-offer, and the bargaining techniques are all important phases that should not be disregarded and we must always make better use of each of them.

Ricardo mainly discusses the importance of the information exchange phase, which is often the decisive phase for the final success of the negotiation.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

#negociation, #projectmanagement, #communication, #risk #governance

In this episode, Ricardo talks about the fatigue of change, and the constant need for adaptability. Frequent changes can lead to frustration, apathy and reduced team productivity. To manage this, Ricardo suggests three tips: open and transparent communication to explain changes and listen to feedback; empathy to support and recognize team challenges; and prioritization to help the team focus amidst numerous changes. He explains the importance of mental stability in navigating change and encourages implementing these strategies to improve project performance and team morale.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the difference between compliance and conformity.

Compliance and conformity are rules that an organization must always follow. However, the purpose of each is quite different.

Often the company decides to follow a specific rule not because it has to but because it is good for the business, such as obtaining ISO certification. In this case, we are talking about conformity; that is, conformity is everything the company is committed to doing because it will be suitable for it.

Compliance, on the other hand, are rules that the company must follow to stay in business. For example, a publicly-traded company has audits and reports that need to be sent to regulatory bodies such as, in the case of Brazil, the CVM (Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission). These reports are not made because the company wants to, but because it is a legal requirement for them to be disclosed.

That is, compliance is the set of rules that exist to ensure that the organization acts in compliance with the laws and regulations in force.

Ricardo gives some examples of conformity and compliance in projects. He also cites the recent example of Elon Musk's Twitter purchase deal, where one party considers the information about fake accounts as compliance, and the other considers it as conformity already declared in the purchase memorandum.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about availability bias. He explains that when a risky event is repeatedly exposed on the news or by a group of people next to us, our perception is altered by that exposure, which often makes us lose rationality about the real probability or impact.

One of the examples is the panic seized by the delay of flights all over the world. Of course, there is a delay, but there is at the same time a perception that 100% of flights are delayed or canceled, and all bags and luggage have been lost. This assessment is not necessarily correct.

The reality is that we live in a world with abundant information and availability, and this amount of information can radically affect our perception.

Ricardo also gives some tips on how to mitigate the effects of availability bias.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Global Project Management Forum 2022 in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is investing in a series of megaprojects called "Vision 2030" that involve all aspects of society, from housing construction and financing to the liberation and promotion of tourism, from the digital government, using artificial intelligence big data in healthcare to the administration of the NEOM megaproject, which aims to be a new model of sustainable living, work, and prosperity.

These are investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The event was the first in Saudi Arabia, focusing on project management at the heart of the skills required to make these mega projects a reality.

Visit NEOM.com for you to realize the dimension of a piece of this transformation.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Gallup - State of the Global Workspace 2022 report.

This report is the result of an interview with people around the world and shows the level of stress, motivation, and engagement of people working in companies.

According to the report, 60% of people interviewed consider themselves disconnected from work. And to make matters worse, 19% are actively disengaged. 79% of people are unhappy with their work.

A frightening number.

Ricardo also talks about the book he just released with Harold Kerzner and Al Zeitoun: Project Management Next Generation: The Pillars for Organizational Excellence.

The book has several cases from companies worldwide, showing good project management practices.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the potential applications of artificial intelligence in projects and compares the different impacts and implementation complexity of each of them.

He comments that a project that is self-managed in all dimensions by Artificial Intelligence will have a tremendous impact on both the people involved in the project and the project itself. However, the complexity of deploying artificial intelligence mechanisms of this magnitude is extraordinarily high and unlikely in the short or medium-term horizon.

AI seeks to identify patterns and learn from those patterns or rules. In the example of games like chess or Go, there is a closed system, and the rules do not change throughout the game, making learning possible.

However, behavioral issues such as trading and risks involve a much more complex and unpredictable scenario, where the machine has difficulty interpreting and recognizing patterns.

Ricardo talks about five items where artificial intelligence can be used for projects and assesses the complexity and impact of each one.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn about the five applications of artificial intelligence and assess the complexity of implementing each one and its impact on projects.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" in projects, that is, how different perspectives on a problem can dramatically change our ability to solve it.

Making an analogy with a photo, when we use Zoom in, we can see in more detail a small part of that photo. This Zoom In helps us understand "surgically" when in a crisis scenario. However, in some situations, Zoom In makes us lose context, leaving us overwhelmed with the level of detail.

When we use Zoom Out, we get the big picture, and we get to see the context; we get the Big Picture. However, if we use Zoom Out all the time, we miss a detail, which in many situations is important.

Ricardo suggests that you see the article by Rosabeth Kanter from Harvard Business School about the subject.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

#ProjectManagement #Leadership #crisis

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Daily Scrum, the daily Scrum meeting.

Ricardo gives five tips that can increase the effectiveness of the process, including aspects related to duration, format, and even the sequence of topics to be addressed.

Spoiler: It is possible to use many Daily Scrum features in project meetings that use other approaches!

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo addresses the pitfalls of the "easy" route to certification. He explains that we often want to find a shortcut to achieving our goals, such as getting a professional certification. However, the certification may apply to your CV or LinkedIn profile. Now, if it is not accompanied by understanding, it is worth little and survives even less.

We have many course options that promise a 2-day training to pass certification or get your money back. With all the respect for the options of each one, this type, of course, teaches how to pass the test but does not teach the hard task of leading projects.

And what matters to the customer, to your company and to you, is not the credential after the name. It is the project delivering the value that was promised.

Ricardo makes an analogy between certification and a driving license. You can do a driving school and pass the test because you were lucky or even because you trained so much on that specific race circuit that you simply memorized the movements. Here comes the question: do you know how to drive?

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

#Project Management, #Certication, #PMP, #Scrum, career

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Forensic Planning, explaining that this is an area of ​​Project Management widely used for claims, litigation, and lawsuits.

Often in capital projects or large projects, delays and other types of disruption happen when parties disagree on which side is responsible.

This type of work attempts to assess and support the parties in the solution and identify the root cause of the problem. For example, analyzing whether that delay could be avoided or not or whether the cost overrun can be repaired by one of the parties or not.

Ricardo explains that the traditional concept of Gantt chart or critical path analysis is being used in courtrooms, moderation panels, and measurements to address this type of dispute between stakeholders through forensic planning.

He also ends with a challenge. Why can't other types of projects benefit from this type of approach?

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the three central values ​​that project management brings to the organization that you could talk about in a brief speech in an Elevator Pitch.

The first: Project management is one of the most powerful tools to organize your workflow and prevent chaos from setting in. Regardless of the approach used, project management will define the criteria that will manage the flow of work within the organization.

The second: Ensure an alignment between the effort undertaken and the delivery of value. It is necessary to understand the objective and benefits that the project will bring to your client and your organization. Project management defines the value chain and measures the benefits.

The third: Mitigate project risks. Project management naturally helps to reduce risks, as there is a defined workflow.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this episode, Ricardo talks about the difficulty of recognizing a project in crisis and offers three reasons why this is challenging. First, cultural stigma prevents leaders from admitting failure, as it can imply incompetence. Secondly, the belief that problems can be solved unnoticed is misleading since recovering from a crisis requires much more effort than avoiding it. Third, fear of job loss causes individuals to hide problems. Accepting a crisis is crucial to changing the project's direction and finding solutions. Ricardo explains that dealing with projects requires a unique mindset, confidence, and discipline to recognize and resolve problems effectively.

Listen to the podcast to learn more!

*Image generated using PMOtto.ai for ChatGPT.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the latest news published in the press about the streaming service Netflix, which, upon announcing the first reduction in the number of subscribers to the platform in the last ten years, suffered a devastating drop in the value of its shares.

Netflix's value dropped from more than 300 billion dollars at the end of 2020 to 89 billion after the announcement. It is a 70% drop, and to give you some perspective, this loss is four times the value of Warner Bros. (owner of HBO) and the same value as Walt Disney Co.

This shift brings us to question why such a disruptive company can have such a dramatic shock, expected only for "startups" or companies in traditional segments and at significant risk of being overshadowed.

Given this scenario, Ricardo reflects on three lessons we can learn from these events:

1. The relevance of understanding potential inflection points that change the direction of a business or market.

2. The understanding that projects and initiatives behave much more like a roller coaster than a highway, where fluctuations will happen.

3. Understand that past success is not a proxy for future success.

Often, your project can hit such a dramatic inflection point that it can cause you to change an entire segment.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to find out more.

#VUCA, #Strategy, #Risks #complexity

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about customizing methods and approaches in project management.

He explains that we insist on finding a solution that solves all the problems in the project, but in reality, there is no "One size fits all." No methodology or approach is universally perfect for all scenarios, and the nature of the project and the very definition presuppose something unique.

Today we have several project management approaches and methods that create a set of principles that guide our behavior towards the project.

Ricardo makes an analogy with a toolbox, where we need to know and have different techniques to make the toolbox solve the organization's problems in a more versatile way.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Round-Robin Brainstorming technique.

Ricardo explains that with this technique, everyone participates by analyzing, confirming, and questioning the other participants, and he makes an analogy between a football championship, where all teams play each other.

Round-Robin prevents the dominant personality from conducting the brainstorming in a direction other than the collective of the group doing the brainstorming.

Ricardo explains the 6 steps to perform this technique and comments that it looks a little like Crawford's Slip technique, but it differs in the construction of ideas, where you develop your idea based on the idea of the colleague next to you.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about flexibility and inflexibility when planning something.

We often have the mindset of planning, executing, and controlling something so that it must go exactly as planned. Any variation in the plan is bad and should be avoided, this is inflexibility, and all we don't have today is predictability, showing that the world of inflexibility no longer exists.

Ricardo explains that we need to have a broader range of decision-making regarding changes, to be flexible, and teams have to seek as much autonomy as possible.

And finally, Ricardo gives three tips for you to have a team with more autonomy, more flexibility, and more conditions to adapt to this changing environment, that is, to be anti-fragile, which are:

• Invest in knowledge and understand the cause-and-effect relationships.
• Work with principles rather than processes.
• Measure the result by the ability of people to work together and produce the expected deliverables.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Satir Change Model, created by family psychologist Virginia Satir, considered the mother of modern family psychology.

The podcast has a business focus, even though it was created thinking in the family environment. The model became widely used in the business context change process.

The model tells us that, despite the final result of the change being positive, in the improvement process, there is a phase where things become worse before they improve.

Ricardo mentions the 5 phases of change: Late Current Status, Resistance, Chaos, Integration, and New Status Quo. He also considers that these five steps can represent all change processes.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast and understand better about this model, a good tool that Ricardo uses a lot in driving change.

In this week's episode, Ricardo returns to the concept of Antifragile, presented by Nicholas Taleb in his book, where Taleb stated that the antifragile "is not necessarily the opposite of fragile" but "what improves with shock."

Ricardo talks about making the different types of systems antifragile, systems that can be you, your career, or your company.

He complements the concept and outlines the five steps from fragile to antifragile.

He starts by using the Barbell Bar concept, which talks about balancing weights and thus reducing fragility, and goes through the other four of the five steps proposed by Taleb: Decrease Fragility, Generate Options, Modularize, Risk Your Skin and Reflect and Learn From the Failure.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the concept of Antifragile, presented by Nicholas Taleb in his book.

To better explain it, Ricardo explains the meaning of being "fragile" and "robust," where "robust" is not necessarily the opposite of fragile. Robust refers to the ability to resist shock and is not necessarily improved by shock.

What improves with shock is Antifragile. And what you gain from stress.

The only way to thrive in such a volatile environment is to create an Antifragile mindset and attitude.

Ricardo exemplifies several Antifragile systems such as our muscles, the dandelion flower, the Hydra of Hercules, and even the coronavirus.

All these environments have something in common: They grow under stress, adapt, and learn.

Next week Ricardo will complement the concept and talk about the five steps to take the fragile to the Antifragile using the Barbell Bar concept.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Hawthorne effect. Despite the rather unusual name, the effect is associated with changing our behavior whenever someone observes us.

He gives examples in our daily lives, such as the compliments our young children receive when they stay at other people's houses or when we watch programs like Big Brother.

Ricardo also talks about the Hawthorne effect in projects. When we are being observed while performing a task or measuring a specific result or parameter of the project, the tendency is to have our performance affected by the presence of someone watching.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to find out more.

Ricardo recently watched, using his project management perspective, the documentary "Fyre - The Great Event That Never Happened," which was recommended by a friend.

Fyre was supposed to be one of the music festivals that was supposed to be one of the most exclusive globally and ended up being a complete fiasco.

The initial idea was to create an event to promote the celebrity booking application called Fyre. However, its founder lost its way during the journey and let passion prevail over reality.

Successive mistakes, combined with bad faith, inability to communicate, and chaos, created an irreversible failure scenario.

But this failure brings us some precious lessons.

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to find out more.

#leadership, #projectmager, #risk, #realstory, #failure.

Faced with this week's events with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ricardo had decided not to record any new episode this week.

However, today he decided to record a different episode, talking about empathy and support in uncertain times like the current ones.

In this week's episode, he talks about the importance of understanding that reality has changed and that there is no perspective on how the subsequent events will unfold.

At this moment, it becomes critical that everyone shows empathy and support for those traumatically affected by the invasion.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

In this episode, Ricardo explores the SCARF model, a powerful framework developed by neuroscientist David Rock to understand and manage social behaviors in projects. He examines the five key domains of SCARF: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness—and discusses how each of these elements can significantly impact team dynamics and project outcomes.

By recognizing and addressing these social drivers, project managers can create a more positive and productive environment and ultimately achieve greater project success.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

*Image generated using PMOtto.ai for ChatGPT.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the similarities and differences between managing projects/programs/portfolios and managing products.

He explains that the product is the result of a project or program most of the time. However, it can also result from chance or simply an unexpected opportunity.

The life cycle of a product can involve numerous projects: from the creation of the product itself to the development of new features and adaptations that may become necessary due to externalities and external factors.

Even when the company decides to discontinue the product, it is necessary to have a decommissioning project.

Finally, a project starts with the end in mind. The product, although it also exists within a life cycle, it will exist as long as the value for the business exists.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Problem Statement. He explains that we often receive a problem with a solution from our customers.

The given solution is not always the correct one; before thinking about how to implement the solution, we need to be clearer about what problem our project is trying to solve.

It is necessary to listen to the user and write down everything to understand the problem and question whether there are alternatives beyond the conventional.

Ricardo also gives an example of a problem that already came with a solution, but when the scope of the problem is better understood, we may have several other alternatives.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the many ways to gain experience in project management that go beyond formal education, courses and certifications. He also mentions that you don't start a career in projects managing gigantic or highly complex projects.

The main part of the podcast is in the three tips you can follow to increase your experience and make project management part of your DNA.

The first is that it is necessary to apply project management concepts in our daily lives. We should think of simple tasks and small projects in our daily lives as opportunities to practice the concepts. Whether it's planning your child's birthday, renovating your home or completing your MBA project. There are opportunities all the time to think about the possibility of setting up a Kanban, an EAP or even applying the concept of decision gates, so talked about in the FEL model.

The second tip is that you diversify your experience, applying the concepts in different areas and projects. This diverse experience allows you to learn about various aspects, approaches and challenges.

And the third tip is that you look for opportunities to volunteer in your own company's projects, dedicating extra time to this, making you help your colleagues and learn new concepts.

Listen to the episode to learn more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the relevance of early warning systems. He comments that one of our biggest aims in risk management is to anticipate the knowledge and awareness of unexpected events.

Ricardo gives some examples and explains that one of the mechanisms that help us identify threats is project indicators, showing clear signs of a problem without having the pain.

The sooner we recognize these signs, the faster we can resolve them.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to find out more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about how you show your experience in projects and in product development for a job interview or when you are preparing your CV or applying for a postgraduate course, for example.

He gives three tips on which aspects to consider:

The first: What type of project have you worked on, engineering, technology, digital transformation, etc.

The second: What was the magnitude of the challenge? What were the budget and the number of people impacted?

The third: What was your role in the project, who was under your leadership, what kind of activity were you doing? In the case of your role, Ricardo explains that you should never report a position that differs from the reality you had.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the exponential growth of problems in the project. He explains with several examples what exponential growth is, such as the behaviour of social networks when a post is shared with ten people and that each one will share with another ten people. So on, the number of views has a massive growth.

We often rely on intuition to make a future prediction, imagining linearity. Still, we live in an era of turbulent, dynamic and transformational scenarios where one small problem in your project can trigger another, and you have an avalanche of problems in the end.

Trusting your intuition is essential, but it's much better to trust the numbers you're getting on your project.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about cadence in the project.

He explains that cadence dictates the rhythm of project deliveries and gives some examples of cadence, such as the frequency of the heartbeat and the rhythm of a military parade.

Ricardo talks about the four types of cadence, which are not necessarily linked to shorter or longer intervals but rather the project's ability to make deliveries that add and produce value for the customer.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

In the first episode of 2022, Ricardo decided to share four books and three online courses/platforms you should look at right now to start your year with the right foot.

The books have two things in common: none are about Project Management, and he wrote none of them :). They cover aspects of uncertainty, culture, mindset, and career.

Listen to the #5minpodcast to know more.

This episode is the last #5minpodcast of 2021.

This week Ricardo shares five key lessons he learned about 2021 that are paving his way to 2022 and can also help you make a better 2022.

He also made a LinkedIn article with a few things that are keeping him awake at night. You can read it in full at https://rvarg.as/lookingback.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

This week's episode is super special, with Ricardo talking about the launch of the James Webb Telescope, scheduled for December 24th.

He explains that the project to build this telescope is extremely complex (we haven't found an even bigger term to describe how complex the project is). And for a project of this size, the level of competence of the professionals involved doesn't matter. Even having the best team in the world, the project is so complicated that anything can happen.

The James Webb has a technology that has never been used, such as the five very thin protective layers of insulating material to allow the telescope to operate at 100 degrees Celsius on one side and at -235 degrees Celsius on the other side. Imagine over 300 degrees in less than 50 cm on five sheets so thin they look like hair.

The launch of this telescope will be part of our history. For 30 days from the moment it is launched from French Guiana, a series of 50 unfolding processes will begin that will last practically one month until it reaches its endpoint, about 1.5 million km from Earth. The Hubble Telescope has located about 550km from Earth to give you perspective, and the new telescope is 2,700 times farther away.

It is a very high-risk project, as it is extremely sensitive equipment with 344 points of failure. If one of them doesn't work, the entire project may not deliver the result, and 25 years of development and more than 10 billion dollars could be lost.

Watch the launch on the 24th at 7:20 AM ET, 9:20 AM Brasilia time, 12:20 PM WET at https://rvarg.as/webb

Listen to the podcast to learn more about this amazing project.

In this episode, Ricardo discusses the misconception that using AI tools like ChatGPT is cheating. He distinguishes between ethical and unethical uses of AI. Using AI to improve communication or generate ideas is fair if the user remains the intellectual author. However, passing off AI-generated work as your own, such as writing articles for publication, is cheating. Ricardo highlights the importance of transparency and ethical considerations in using AI, recommending AI as a tool to enhance human creativity and productivity, not to replace or distort it.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

* Image generated by PMOtto.ai Plug-In for ChatGPT 4

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the book "The Rule is No Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention", whose subject is the culture of Netflix.

Ricardo explains that he read this book recently, which is based on an interview @reed Hastings gave to @Des Dearlove from @Thinkers50.

Ricardo comments that Netflix breaks the chain of command and control and adopts a policy (or maybe no policy) where employees are free to make decisions by themselves on all sorts of topics, including how their vacation will be or how their travel expenses will be.

He also says that in the interview, Reed said that the only "rule" is to make decisions always considering Netflix's best interest.

Another exciting factor is that people are free to be truthful, even if they disagree with an idea coming from the CEO. And last but not least, Netflix values humility, helping and being helped by colleagues.

Ricardo recommends you read the book and look at the Netflix Culture page at https://jobs.netflix.com/culture.

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In this week's episode, Ricardo explains the difference between agility and agile methods.

He says that if the project uses an agile method, it may not necessarily have agility. And on the other hand, a project that uses the predictive model may have agility.

Ricardo comments that, regardless of the method used, it is first necessary to have a critical sense of urgency, agility and adaptability in the organization.

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In this second episode of the series, Ricardo talks about three challenges to applying Artificial Intelligence in project management and product development in general.

The first challenge is regarding the quality of the data that will be used. Ricardo explains that in project management, a clear business rule is not respected, which makes it much more complex to have reliable data for artificial intelligence to cross-reference this data to generate relevant patterns for analysis.

The second challenge is to stipulate and predict standards for human behaviour. A simple challenge that a professional has when commuting to work one day can directly impact work and productivity.

The third challenge is the ethical aspect. How would artificial intelligence make the decision faced with an ethical dilemma?

Listen to the podcast to learn more.