Play Now: For your Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam we recommend the following PMP Exam Prep: Wanda Curlee and Cornelius Fichtner Every project manager needs to master situational awareness. That is because no two projects are perfectly alike. What worked last time may have to be tweaked next time. Even worse, what may have worked just yesterday may have to be tweaked today! This interview about situational awareness with Wanda Curlee was recorded at the Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Congress 2016 in San Diego, California. It was co-written and co-presented with Marie Sterling. Wanda and I discuss their presentation and white paper Situational Awareness. Do you have the Emotional Intelligence for it?. Here is the abstract: This paper explores the relationship of situational awareness and emotional intelligence of portfolio, program, and project leadership. Included in the paper is an introduction to situational awareness, emotional intelligence, SAGAT, recommendations and details about the workshop exercise. Situational awareness plays a critical role in effective decision making, and more so in complex and challenging portfolio, program and project management environments. Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the study of how in tune a person is with his or her own emotions and the ability to understand emotions of those around himself or herself. Through the use of a live training simulation, an individual’s level of situational awareness and their emotional intelligence will be determined. Click to download the white paper Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner:  Hello everyone and welcome back to the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com . I am sitting here in the halls of the beautiful and sunny San Diego Convention Center here at the 2016 PMI Global Congress and in front of me is Wanda Curlee. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner:   Hello, Wanda. Wanda Curlee:   Nice to see you again, Cornelius.      Cornelius:   Welcome back on the program.   Wanda:  Thank you very much. An honor to be here. Cornelius:  Yeah. You are speaking on Situational Awareness: Do you have the Emotional Intelligence for it? Have you already presented it? Wanda:   No, I have not. I’ll present tomorrow morning. Cornelius: Have you any idea how many people have registered? Wanda:   The last time we checked there were about 60 people, so we’re hoping for a little bit more but if only 60 show up, that’s fine. If one shows up, we’ll do it. Cornelius:   OK. Wonderful. Well, good luck. You said “we” and that is the moment where we also have to acknowledge your co-author and co-presenter. Wanda:   Yes. That is Marie Sterling. She is actually the expert on situational awareness. She does a lot with the Canadian Military Services. I know they’ve combined everybody but she does the air side. She also does something similar to the American Civil Air Patrol where she goes out and tries to find lost hikers or planes that have gone down. Cornelius:   So, let’s take a look at your paper since there are two authors you mentioned. You are more on the emotional intelligence side and she is more on the situational awareness but we’re going to cover both topics. The abstract begins as follows: The paper explores the relationship of situational awareness and emotional intelligence of portfolio, program and project leadership. How does this understanding help me as a project manager? Wanda:   OK. We all know that we need to understand what the political situation is in a company. However, situational awareness takes that one step further. It’s—am I reading the data correctly? So that’s Lev