May, 2016

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A Complete Guide to RACI/RASCI Charts

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Working out who does what on your project can be a challenge. A RACI chart is a project management tool that helps you do exactly that. At the end of this article there’s a link to download my free roles and responsibilities document template. Scroll to the bottom to get it. In this article I’ll give you everything you need to know about producing a RACI chart for your project.

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How to Be a Productive Project Manager: 7 Tips

Project Risk Coach

Many project managers feel overwhelmed with emails, phone calls, and meetings. They often work overtime, but few feel as though they are making progress. Although we are all given the same amount of time each day, some project managers are able to produce greater value for their organizations. Some are more engaged. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock (edited in Canva).

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7 tips to ensure you meet project deliverables dates

Moira Alexander

Whether internal or external, successfully meeting client deliverables is a primary goal behind projects. Deliverables may be different for each project depending on industry, nature of the project, project size, company strategy and a host of other variables. That said, there are multiple shared factors that can easily compromise these deliverables and ultimately client satisfaction.

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Sprint plan: common sense goes here

Musings on Project Management

Now, let's here it for common sense! More and more I see this asset creeping into the advice we get about Agile, and even more so about how to handle the various things that show up in a sprint. The latest: trying to "freeze" hard the sprint backlog may be impractical. It may be more slushy than a hard freeze. [Didn't we all know that all along?

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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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Progressive elaboration is the only sane approach to planning!

Kiron Bondale

Imagine that you are planning a multi-day road trip across the country to a town which you’ve never visited before. Chances are that you will load your smartphone with maps to help you navigate the journey as well as identifying some points of interest and regularly spaced hotels along the way. What are the odds that you will plan your trip down to the hour?

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More Trending

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Bank Holiday

Rebel’s Guide to PM

We’re enjoying the sunshine (and I’m catching up on preparing some course materials for the upcoming training that I’m launching). Hope you are having a lovely day and see you on Wednesday! I have a bumper article planned about comparing different types of Agile approaches… P.S. The last giveaway winner has been contacted (they won a copy of Effective Decision-Making) but they haven’t yet confirmed their details for their prize.

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12 Questions for Gaining Control of Your Risks

Project Risk Coach

Are you a project manager who focuses on gaining control of your project risks? Some project managers start their projects with a strong focus on risk management. However, somewhere along the way they lose steam. They increasingly spend more time dealing with issues and implementing workarounds. They are frustrated and filled with anxiety. Other project managers start out strong.

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Project Branding

The Lazy Project Manager

Extract from my book ‘Project Branding’ published by RMC Publications, Inc. The project name is important in setting the tone and personality of the project, and this name can be a powerful marketing tool, or even a major part of the brand for a significant project. The name should reflect the overall goals and objectives of the project—what the project is about and what it’s meant to deliver.

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SCRUM is about people

Musings on Project Management

Looking to hone your people skills and tie into SCRUM? Here's a seminar -- free even you are not a member -- that is more or less on the theme: "SCRUM is about people". Read in the library at Square Peg Consulting about these books I've written Buy them at any online book retailer!

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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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Three things you should do whenever someone leaves your project

Kiron Bondale

We start our projects with a small core team but as we proceed further down the rabbit hole we add team members to support planning and delivery activities. Then as work streams get completed, team size shrinks until we reach project closure where we are back to the original core team. On large, multi-phase projects, team expansion and contraction occurs frequently but even with much smaller projects, it is common to have team members exit before the project itself is completed.

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People deliver projects; not processes

Ron Rosenhead

It has been an interesting few months working with clients and listening to some of the issues course participants face: My sponsor takes a too hands on/off approach and I find it difficult to deal with. I have a team member who despite saying they will deliver simply does not. No matter what I do they always fail to deliver and this is becoming concerning and demotivating for the team.

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5 Tips (+ Bonus Tip) For Getting The Most Out Of Conferences

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I’m off to Barcelona at the weekend as I am part of a panel debate at the PMI Global Congress in Spain next week. My session is on collaboration tools and tech for project managers. Today I’ve got 5 tips (and a personal favourite bonus one at the end) about how to get the most out of attending a conference. You make a big investment in going to conferences so it helps to do a bit of thinking and planning about how to benefit while you’re there. 1.

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What Everybody Should Know About Controlling Risks

Project Risk Coach

Many project managers do a great job of identifying risks. Some even evaluate risks and develop response plans. However, project managers get busy as their projects progress and fail to control risks, resulting abandoned or wrecked projects. So, what does it mean to control risks? Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock (edited in Canva). Here’s the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition: control: to direct the behavior: to cause to do what you want.

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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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PMI Are some more equal than others?

The Lazy Project Manager

‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. That was a proclamation in the novel Animal Farm, by George Orwell and I offer up, not a proclamation but a declaration, followed by a disclaimer, but beginning with a statement – and that statement is ‘I am a worried man, no let me correct that, I am a worried project manager’. Worried that I am speaking too much, that others (like myself) are speaking too much, that we as a group might have become boring, irrelevant and pote

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The value of an idea

Musings on Project Management

"Managing project value" has been a theme I've written a lot about -- I've even written a whole book about it (Did you notice the book cover below?) So, I was fascinated with a series on the Kahn Academy about the value of a start-up. Admittedly, venture start-up is a little off the bore-sight of a project, but not that far off.

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What they weren’t telling you when you took over that project…

Kiron Bondale

Lemon. When house hunting, savvy shoppers quickly learn the meaning of some seemingly innocent phrases found in listing descriptions. For example, lots of potential means that you will have to spend a lot of money to make the house livable. Quaint implies that no upgrades have been made since the house was originally built. When taking over a project from another project manager, similar rules apply.

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10 tips for project success: manage risk

The Digital Project Manager

Posted in General. Risks are ugly little things. They’re the things you never really want to talk about. But if the risks become issues, you’ll be in a bit of bother. So the temptation is just to sweep them under the carpet, never talk about them to the client and hope for the best. That’s a recipe for impending doom. Managing risk (or Management of Risk, sometimes helpfully abbreviated to MoR) is such a big deal that you.

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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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Inspiring Women in PM: Christine Unterhitzenberger

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Yey! I love this time each month when I get to interview a fantastic woman doing something amazing in the world of project management. Today it’s the turn of Christine Unterhitzenberger, a practitioner-turned-academic who is researching the social dynamics of project teams and how fairness affects project success. Let’s get started… Christine, how did you get into project management?

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What to Do When a Bad Moon is Arising on Your Project

Project Risk Coach

Ever have this sinking feeling that a bad moon is arising on your project? You’re not sure what the problem is, but you know things are out of control. Image courtesy of Abobe Stock (edited in Canva). One of the strongest telltale signs of project trouble is increasing numbers of project issues. The negative events that you were concerned about have occurred.

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LiquidPlanner Wins Two CODiEs! Best Project Management Solution and Mobile Solution

LiquidPlanner

OMG, we did it again! We’re thrilled to announce that LiquidPlanner won TWO SIIA Software CODiE Awards this week. For the second year in a row, we won the CODiE for Best Project Management Solution , and yesterday added a new award to the trophy shelf: the CODiE for Best Project Management Mobile Application. What it means to win a CODiE. This is big news and we’re excited for a number of reasons.

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Technical debt -- A definition?

Musings on Project Management

Technical debt: we've all written about it; I've described in my book, Project Management the Agile Way (see below), but I guess the industry has never settled on a formal definition. I've always thought of it as a "punch list" that is a "debt" that must be retired in the future. stuff that needs to get DONE or fixed so that we can say to the sponsor: hey, it's DONE and the QUALITY is.

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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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Is your methodology a melting pot or a tapestry?

Kiron Bondale

In large organizations it takes a village to deliver a project. There are multiple internal stakeholders who must collaborate and contribute to generate project success. Many of them will have requirements of their own which they expect will be met. Some of these relate directly to the project’s underlying business rationale whereas others satisfy regulatory or policy compliance needs.

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Creating virtual co-location: a guide to managing remote teams

The Digital Project Manager

Posted in General. There’s no doubt that co-locating a team is one of the best ways to improve communication and productivity. However, with many agencies using teams that span multiple locations, the benefits of physical co-location are not always possible. So how do you mix the trend for remote working and distributed teams with a collaborative, more agile approach, that really hinges on effective real-time teamwork and how can you achieve that feel-good, co-located feeling in a distrib

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Giveaway: Effective Decision-Making Book

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Do you struggle to get people on your team to make decisions? I have the perfect solution for you. Edoardo Binda Zane’s book, Effective Decision-Making is what you need to get your team focused. It’s a collection of tools for making better business decisions. Forget the academic and complicated techniques that you might have read about already – these are practical suggestions that work.

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How to Look Backward and Forward at Your Risks

Project Risk Coach

Project managers may fail to achieve their project objectives because they don’t know how to take a look backward and forward at their risks. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock (edited in Canva). Some project managers only look backward. If we only look backward, we will miss opportunities that lie before us, and we will likely be blindsided by threats.

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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.