December, 2022

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Using the 5 Whys in Project Management

LiquidPlanner

Nearly 2,500 years ago, Socrates (when he was not occupied with founding Western philosophy and instructing his star student, Plato) pioneered a method of asking questions that led people to draw conclusions and pursue deeper truths and realities. His practice of relentlessly picking apart ideas earned him the deserved reputation of being the gadfly of philosophy.

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Five Techniques for Risk Identification in Projects

Project Risk Coach

Risk identification is an integral part of project risk management. It is essential for any project manager to know what risks might affect a project and navigate them. This article will examine the five techniques for risk identification. Techniques for Risk Identification 1. Use a Risk List A risk list is a list of potential risks for an industry, organization, or company.

Risk 395
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Project lessons I learned from installing ceramic tiles

Kiron Bondale

For those of you who are Do It Yourself (DIY) pros, you may not consider this a significant accomplishment, but not usually being a DIY’er, I am quite pleased with having installed ceramic wall tiles for the first time ever. In this particular case, the tiling was backsplash for our main bathroom sink area. Once the work was completed, a friend who had provided a lot of hands-on assistance and tool support suggested that there might be some delivery lessons I could harvest from this home i

Risk 244
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How Culture Can Impact Communication in the Workplace

Rebel’s Guide to PM

It’s no secret that culture can have a big impact on communication. Just think about how much harder it is to communicate with someone from a different country who doesn’t speak your language. But culture can affect communication even when everyone speaks the same language. Different cultures have different ways of communicating, and if you’re not aware of these differences, it can lead to misunderstanding and conflict.

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Understand Digital Debt, Form a Team, Set Goals, and Plan Roadmap for Transformation

Understanding digital debt is crucial before digital transformation. Assemble a team to assess internal operations, market pressures, and digital debt's impact. Define future digital vision with measurable goals. Refine hypotheses and conduct market analysis. Develop a roadmap for transformation with defined projects, cost estimates, and governance.

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Best of: How to Write a Proper Project Management Plan?

PM Times

You have a big project and you know that the basis of successfully executing lies in the project management plan. The pressure is rising. But there is no need for you to get overwhelmed because all you need is some guidance on how to write the project management plan. Writing a project management plan […]. The post Best of: How to Write a Proper Project Management Plan?

Planning 106

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Top 10 Agile Estimation Techniques for Project Managers In 2023

nTask

One of the things agile project managers struggle the most with is an accurate agile estimation. How are PMs identify the time and effort required to accomplish a task in the backlog? How can one be sure that their plan will work in the long run? When things get tough for PMs, they turn to […].

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Six sins with work boards

Kiron Bondale

Regardless of what type of work your team does, work boards can be a helpful tool. But just because they can be helpful doesn’t mean they are always implemented well. The most common mistake is when teams don’t keep their work boards up to date with the actual status of work that is being done. Increasing transparency is a great way for stakeholders to understand what is going on and to increase their level of trust in teams.

SCRUM 177
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What Is Lean Portfolio Management? A Quick Guide

ProjectManager.com

Having many projects to manage in a portfolio can be daunting. You need to strategize and plan your resource allocation to ensure that every project has what it needs when it needs it. There are many ways to do this and one of which is lean portfolio management. Let’s first define lean portfolio management and then delve into how it works. This will give you an idea if it’s the right strategy to execute your portfolio management.

Lean 331
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Everything You Need to Know About Release Managers

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Do you have a release manager on the team? Or are you wondering whether it would be a pretty good job to move into? It wasn’t until I worked in IT as a project manager that I had a lot of contact with the release management process. My software projects needed releasing, so we had to follow the formal process and engage with the release manager to make sure that the bug fixes and new features got pushed to the production environment in a controlled way.

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Strategic Project Finance Essentials: A Project Manager’s Guide to Financial Metrics

Speaker: Ketan Jahagirdar - Sopheon’s Director of Product Management

Empower yourself as a project manager with insights that directly influence the financial landscape and strategic direction of your organization! Join us for a deep dive into the world of financial strategy, as we dissect key metrics that drive CFOs and business leaders’ investment decisions. This session will equip you with the necessary tools to craft compelling business cases as well as a comprehensive understanding of the crucial distinction between capital expenditure and operational expend

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How can Product Owners get maximum value from Scrum?

Scrum.org

Scrum is a lightweight framework for solving complex problems. Therefore, the mechanics, as shown in the next picture, are relatively easy to understand: . It's the Scrum Master's job to bring the Scrum framework to life. And yet that is no guarantee that the product will be successful. It is the Product Owner's job to maximize the value of the product.

SCRUM 231
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How To Create A Procurement Management Plan In 8 Easy Steps

The Digital Project Manager

If you’re not using a procurement management plan and working in tandem with the procurement team, you’re missing a key step in managing risk on your project and staying on budget and on schedule. The procurement management plan sets the boundaries for the entire procurement process, and covers risk management, vendor management, and even the […].

Planning 177
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Why are projects often delivered late?

LiquidPlanner

Why are projects often delivered late? Missed deadlines or missing deadlines – both can challenge your project and cause late delivery. I recently undertook a complex journey by car involving six locations, a number of people, and finally the drive back home. It was over a long distance and took most of one day to complete – but I completed it, and, in fact, I arrived home a few minutes earlier than expected.

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Five benefits to creating a schedule network diagram

Kiron Bondale

Whether you have taken a foundational project management course which covered practices for predictive approaches or you were studying to take the PMP exam, you are likely familiar with schedule network diagrams. However, like many tools and practices in the PMBOK framework, just because we learn about them doesn’t mean we will use them. If you skip creating network diagrams, you could miss out on these benefits.

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20 Common Mistakes Made by Inexperienced Project Managers

You’ve read the PMBOK® Guide several times, taken the certification exam for project managers, passed, and you are now a PMP®. So why do you keep making rookie mistakes? This whitepaper shows 20 of the most common mistakes that young or inexperienced project managers make, issues that can cost significant time and money. It's a good starting point for understanding how and why many PMs get themsleves into trouble, and provides guidance on the types of issues that PMs need to understand.

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Design Brief: A Quick Guide

ProjectManager.com

If you’re working on a design project, wait. Before you start you need to have a design brief. It’s similar to a project brief, only focused on design. After all, you wouldn’t start driving if you didn’t first know your destination. Projects can’t be idle and exploratory endeavors. Design projects are no different, which is why a design brief is so important.

Budget 299
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Project Requirements: The What, Why, and How

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Have you ever been a part of a project that just didn’t seem to be going anywhere? Maybe it felt like there was no clear goal, or that the requirements kept changing. If so, then you know how frustrating and even maddening it can be to try to work on something without having a good understanding of what is required. Requirements are essential for any project, yet they are often one of the most difficult aspects to get right, especially if you work in an environment where there are high lev

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Don't make this planning mistake during Product Backlog refinement in Scrum

Scrum.org

The refinement process for those practicing Scrum determines the detail, order and size of the items in the Product Backlog. The purpose is to ensure that we have the highest-ordered Product Backlog items (PBIs) ready to Sprint. During refinement, the team discusses what we will deliver with each Product Backlog item. Although it's easy to drift into sorting out how we will deliver each PBI during these discussions, planning at this stage is a mistake. .

SCRUM 253
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10 Critical Project Management Concepts You Absolutely Have to Know

Online PM Courses

If you're starting out, you may be wondering: what are the most important Project Management concepts that you need to understand? The post 10 Critical Project Management Concepts You Absolutely Have to Know appeared first on OnlinePMCourses.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Step-by-Step to Smooth Project Closure

LiquidPlanner

Project closure is one of my favorite times in the lifecycle as a project manager. It’s when all your hard work pays off and you complete a structured, efficient handover to the business as usual team. At least, that’s what I was planning for in my head! In reality, it ended up more like a rush to get everything on the project closure checklist ticked off, complete the project wrap up and move on to the next initiative.

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Gantt Chart Vs Timeline: Similarities and Differences Explained

nTask

When it comes to planning and managing projects, many people prefer the Gantt Chart method. This basic visual tool is simple to understand, easy to use, and can help you stay organized and on track. However, there are times when the Timeline method may be a better choice. For instance, if you’re dealing with a […].

Planning 158
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What Is Resource Loading and Why Does It Matter in Project Management?

ProjectManager.com

You’ve heard it countless times; teams are projects’ most valuable resource. They do the work. But a project manager has to connect each team member to that work. Resource loading is a process to keep team members fully engaged throughout the project. Being able to balance the resource load across your team is important. Resource loading in project management helps you avoid overallocation, which can erode morale and weaken productivity.

Budget 300
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Build, Excite, Equip: How to Simplify Change Adoption in Your Projects

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Build, Excite, Equip: How to Simplify Change Adoption in Your Projects, by Nicola Graham, is a handbook for business change management aimed at project managers. Given that project teams have to incorporate the business change elements to make sure projects land as expected – but often without the support of a dedicated change manager – this is a useful and much-needed book.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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How can a Scrum Master serve the organization?

Scrum.org

How can a Scrum Master serve the organization? . There is a very sad joke about Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters regarding work at organization level – “an Agile Coach is a person who works with the organization and makes sure the Scrum Master doesn’t ”. It is both very wrong towards some of the Agile Coaches and unfortunately very right in other cases. .

SCRUM 224
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How To Really Nail Project Scheduling & Wow Your Stakeholders

The Digital Project Manager

Project scheduling is one of the most important components of project management. A well-crafted project schedule helps deliver a project on time and on budget and reduces the risk of scope creep. If done correctly, it may mean the difference between a worn-out, unproductive group of people and a synchronized team that zestfully zips through […].

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How to do more with less

LiquidPlanner

Layoffs and hiring freezes have emerged as a troubling trend given evidence of a slowing economy. In fact, many economists are predicting formalization of the inflation-induced recession as we flip the calendar into 2023. As such, most of us are facing resource constriction and forced now to think about how to do more, with less. This article offers several solutions to this challenge, providing prioritization, process and people tips and how technology can be leveraged.

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A 4-Step Guide to Creating Powerful Team Rituals

Planio

When it comes to productivity, routines and habits get all the attention — but high-performers rely just as heavily on having powerful rituals in place. Rituals tie your team together, creating a shared purpose and a powerful culture. While everyone has their own routines to help them maximize productivity, team rituals create a sense of togetherness and motivation that takes performance to the next level.

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From Complexity to Clarity: Strategies for Effective Compliance and Security Measures

Speaker: Erika R. Bales, Esq.

When we talk about “compliance and security," most companies want to ensure that steps are being taken to protect what they value most – people, data, real or personal property, intellectual property, digital assets, or any other number of other things - and it’s more important than ever that safeguards are in place. Let’s step back and focus on the idea that no matter how complicated the compliance and security regime, it should be able to be distilled down to a checklist.