E108 The Power of Listening with Ruth Bedingfield

Project Management Office Hours

In this episode of Project Management Office Hours, PMO Joe welcomed Ruth Bedingfield. Ruth shares her journey working as a PMO Leader and her path to joining KeyedIn supporting customers. Ruth and Joe discuss the importance of listening, how to react when opportunity knocks, and having passion for your work.
Ruth has 15 years of business expertise with 5+ years focused on the Project Management Office. She understands what successful PMOs are doing today to bring value for their businesses tomorrow through working closely with enterprise project management professionals looking to deliver the value outcomes their businesses need. She understands the role of the PMO for today’s evolving businesses and jumps at the opportunity to help PMOs achieve their goals through data-driven insights from powerful project portfolio management software.
Ruth shared how important it is to be adaptive and flexible as a PMO Leader, “So I think I always like in PMO to being on the ocean. Sometimes it's forever changing, but the ground is never stable. Sometimes the waves are small and it's like a mill pond, sometimes it's like a storm and the waves are crashing down around you. But as a PMO, you learn and you adapt to ride those waves. I think agility and adaptability were really key for me to be able to grow in the role of the PMO Officer.”
Many PMOs face the challenge of overcoming the perception of being the Project Management Police. Ruth had great perspective on this, “it was a really interesting journey. When I was able to sort of get hold of the reigns, I was really fortunate to also have the support of some really strong open minded leaders and sponsors as well as PMO that really felt the value. I think that was one key benefit that I certainly benefited from within our organization. But we did a full reset. I said to everybody, just stop, it's not working. We're firefighting, for instance. We're chasing tails, we're not proactively listening. We need to stop. That's exactly what we did. And we went back to basics.”
Listen to the full episode to hear how working with KeyedIn as a vendor eventually led Ruth to joining the KeyedIn team supporting customers. Be sure to catch the complete conversation and listen to the full episode: https://www.thepmosquad.com/podcasts/project-management-office-hours/episodes/2147775079
Connect with Ruth:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-bedingfield-5076748a/
Connect with KeyedIn:
https://www.keyedin.com
To catch up on previous episodes visit the Project Management Office Hours website - https://www.thepmosquad.com/podcasts/project-management-office-hours
Or see the guest list for upcoming shows - https://www.thepmosquad.com/podcast
Thank you to THE PMO SQUAD and The PMO Leader for sponsoring this show.
The PMO Squad is a leading provider of PMO and Project Management services in the US. They assist clients building and improving PMOs, provide Project Management Consulting services, deliver custom Project Management Training and provide Project Management staffing services.
Learn more about The PMO Squad – https://www.thepmosquad.com
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Learn more about The PMO Leader – https://www.thepmoleader.com
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