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Here is a quiz for you: What do projects and your brain have in common? Well... they are both very unique from other projects and brains, they use soft skills and hard skills to work and they all have a definite beginning and a definite end.

I recently came across the book "Right Brain Project Management" and was intrigued. It is written by Dr. Michael Aucoin (www.leadingedgemgmt.com). He calls it "A Complementary Approach" and it is intended to help us project managers learn to use the right side of our brain better.

When I originally heard the title of the book I thought to myself... "Yeah Right". But then I found that Michael Aucoin was making a lot of sense and I found that I had instinctively implemented many of his suggested approaches. That was more than an excellent reason to bring Michael onto the program. In our interview you'll learn about why we should use the right side of our brain in project management, how it helps our projects to be more successful and how we can use the tools of Emotion, Pattern discovery, Non-verbal communication and Intuition towards the same end.

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In the 2009 PM Podcast Listener Survey you told us that you wanted a) More product reviews and b) More PM soft skills. In this episode we combine these two requests in about 30 minutes.

I'm welcoming Margaret Meloni, PMP who has been a guest many times on our program before. And from those interviews you know that Margaret is a great teacher of project management soft skills. In January of 2010 Margaret is offering almost all of her products with up to a 50% discount. So this episode is a combination of a) product review and b) discussion of PM soft skills. We talk about Margaret's products, interjected with a lot of soft skills talk.

In particular, during our discussion Margaret answers the following questions sent in live from Twitter:

• @bba747: q for margaret: what are her top 3 techniques to quickly identify the motivating agents of project team members?
• @tcsprasan: Which is the most important soft skill a PM must have?
• @splett: is there any chance of success in project management without Knowledge - just pm by Social skills? #mm {Note:Margaret's answer to this question is at the very, very, very end of the podcast. So listen all the way to the absolute end.}

And Margaret also gives us an overview of EQ - Emotional Intellingence.

This is the very first time that we are producing a show that has a strong focus on products for you to buy and improve your skills. Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the result.

If you are a student of The PM PrepCast then you will appreciate this... a video with bloopers from The PM PrepCast. Enjoy.

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It's absolutely amazing but another year has gone by at light speed.

Many of you will have had challenging, aggravating, boring, or exciting new projects. And some of them may even have been completed successfully. It has been my pleasure to interview the project managers involved and discover the methodologies and processes they used for you.

Now it’s time to end the year with a bit of PM fun. This means that I am opening up the vault of recordings that didn't go as planned and in the next minutes you'll hear all the things that didn’t go as planned during the production of the PM Podcast.

Yes, this is the bloopers show, in which I lay bare all the ah, uhm, coughs and times when I stumbled over difficult word combinations.