August, 2016

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Changing the Face of PM Training

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I took my APMP course recently and there were a bemusing amount of training providers to choose from. Go for something like PMP® or PRINCE2 and the choice is even greater. So how do you pick the right course for you? Craig Kilford has the answer. Craig has set up a review website for project management training and there’s a philanthropic initiative on the side as incentive to get people to write reviews.

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Get Ahead of Your Risks

Project Risk Coach

How to use key risk indicators Which would you prefer? To respond to risks after they occur or to see the risks early and take steps to prevent or reduce your risks? I’ll take the latter, thank you! Image courtesy of Adobe Stock. Project managers can get ahead of their risks by thinking differently. Rather than focusing on past performance only, consider how you can anticipate when future threats and opportunities may occur.

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How to spot signs your project is about to fail

Moira Alexander

Project management has many facets and anyone of them could derail even the best-laid plans. Recognizing the signs of an impending disaster can give a project manager the "heads up" before it happens. To help you spot the telltale signs, here are some of the more common signs grouped into three key categories. 1. High-level objectives. Missing strategic tie-in: Difficulty easily and clearly tie the project purpose and goals back to company-wide objectives is one of the biggest signals that proje

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Presentation Counts

The Lazy Project Manager

I was recently in a restaurant in a foreign land (well foreign to me of course but less so to the locals). The location was good, the décor and ambience very acceptable, the company most enjoyable, and the snow fell softly outside providing a winter wonderland visual delight through the large windows. But sadly all of that positive build-up for a great evening’s dining was almost outweighed by the food and service.

PMO 150
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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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Mixing Agile with traditional business

Musings on Project Management

There comes a point where more planning can not remove the remaining uncertainty, instead execution must be used to provide data and remove uncertainty. This quote comes from a nicely argued case -- from the agile blog 'leading answers' -- for mixing agile methods in rather traditional businesses, like the oil and gas exploration/production business If ever there was a business that.

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More Trending

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Understanding Agile

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This is a guest article by Isidora Roskic. Learning to successfully manage agile projects requires you to first familiarise yourself with the concept of Agile. What is the agile methodology? Where did it start? What does it truly encompass? If you know all of the answers then you’re off to a good start! If not then the following will help. Where It All Began.

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10 Powerful Questions in a Checklist to Save Your Projects

Project Risk Coach

The CHAOS Reports have been published every year since 1994 and are a snapshot of the state of the software development industry. The Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report studied 50,000 projects around the world, ranging from small enhancements to massive systems implementations. It revealed that 29% of the projects were successful, 52% were challenged, and 19% failed.

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LiquidPlanner Vs. Task Management Software: An Evaluation Guide

LiquidPlanner

As a LiquidPlanner product expert, I talk to a lot of people considering a new, better Project Management (PM) tool. A question I often get asked is how LiquidPlanner compares to a task management tool—something like Trello or Asana. Are we the same, different, better? Let’s start by addressing how Project Management tools compare to Task Management tools.

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Bangers and Mash

The Lazy Project Manager

Now if you are from the UK you will 100% know what I am talking about, and if you are from Canada, Australia or New Zealand (I am reliably informed) you will also have a good chance of knowing what ‘bangers and mash’ are. But, if you are from elsewhere and haven’t had the personal pleasure of enjoying a mouthful of ‘bangers and mash’ (tasty) then you are probably completely confused.

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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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Reacting to threat: Game theory for the PMO

Musings on Project Management

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. —Theodore Roosevelt Actually, that's Teddy's version of cousin FDR's famous "Try something!" But what if it's all about a threat -- something external -- for which you have no experience? Call in your PMO team and brainstorm?

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Focus on your soft skills when moving to agile!

Kiron Bondale

As companies begin the journey of transforming their delivery practices from traditional to agile approaches, role transitions can be challenging. Such transitions include shifts from functional specialization to “Jack of all Trades, Master of One” for delivery team members as well as the need for increased involvement of product owners and control/governance partners.

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The 5-Step Expert Guide To Choosing Collaboration Tools

Rebel’s Guide to PM

. Since my book Collaboration Tools for Project Managers came out, one of the things I’m asked frequently is ‘how do I choose the right collaboration tool for my team?’. I’m delighted to be partnering with Genius Project today to bring you The 5 Step Expert Guide To Choosing Collaboration Tools. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about how to pick a product for your team!

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Match Game: Project Risk Management

Project Risk Coach

How’s your project risk management knowledge? Some of you are a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) or as a Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP) so this test may be a good review for you. If you are preparing for the PMP or PMI-RMP exam, this exercise will certainly be helpful. For others, give it your best shot; see what you know and don’t know.

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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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The risky side of project management

Moira Alexander

Risks are dependant on a multitude of things and serve as triggers. These dependencies help to identify and measure the impact of the risks; here are just a few of these dependencies. Product and service offerings. Client, vendor, sponsor and project team expectations. Location. Industry norms. Buy-in levels. Cultural differences. Once the dependencies can be determined, it becomes much clearer which of the following risks are likely: Cost overruns.

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Life or Laptop

The Lazy Project Manager

In my bestselling book ‘The Lazy Project Manager [1] ’ I have one chapter entitled ‘Breathe Normally’ where I describe the following situation: You are on yet another flight, either to or from your latest project engagement, somewhere in the world. Maybe you have been lucky, maybe the flight is on time and you know your luggage is safely stored in the overhead locker, you are not seated in the middle seat between two sumo wrestlers with body odour and this flight does offer complimentary in-flig

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The gig project

Musings on Project Management

Familiar with the "gig economy"? It's what some call the power of one. Take one of this and one of that and one person here and there, mix well, and you've got a team. or at least a group that might coalesce into a team, given some time and experience together. But, there can be problems. Heads up if you are managing a gig team: "Problem 1: The people on the projects were not.

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True agility requires ruthless prioritization

Kiron Bondale

Primary roles on agile delivery teams are expected to be fully dedicated to the one project or product that they are supporting. Depending on the scope and context of a project, certain specialized roles such as database administrators might support delivery activities during specific iterations, the core analysts, developers, designers and testers need to focus on that one project or product to avoid incurring the velocity and quality-impacting fruits of multitasking.

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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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A Beginner’s Guide To Backup For Project Managers

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This is a guest article by Mauricio Prinzlau. Are you backing up your project and personal files effectively? Today’s practical option is a cloud storage solution. There are various types of data backup techniques. Conventional backup techniques use tape, DVDs and USB connected devices. Conventional backup techniques are now complemented by the availability of cloud-based backup.

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Manage Your Energy, Not Just Your Time

Project Risk Coach

For years, I’ve sought ways to get more done in my work day. You know the time management mantra: capture, prioritize, and schedule, right? What doesn’t get scheduled doesn’t get done. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock (edited in Canva). Need any apps? I’ve tried iPhone apps such as Fantastical, Pomodoro, and Evernote (which are all super). I’ve read every book and tried every tool known to man.

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How to Get Buy-In for a New Project Management Tool From Your Executive Team

LiquidPlanner

In business, change comes with a price. Even implementing a new tool or process that will benefit the bottom line comes with a price. That cost might be hard dollars and cents, or it might be the time needed to implement the change. But more likely, the cost of change is both money and time. And the broader the implementation is across the organization, the heftier those costs.

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Tool review: Admation

The Digital Project Manager

Posted in General. Project management tools often make the mistake of trying to be everything, to everyone. They create masses of functionality without a real vision of workflow and how the tool might be used by ad agencies and their clients to deliver projects. They start loading in masses of functionality for every type of agency and work but without any real focus.

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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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Evaluating prospects -- alternatives

Musings on Project Management

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky may be a project manager's best friends when it comes to understanding decision making under conditions of risk. . Of course, they've written a lot good stuff over the years.my favorite is "Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases". The original prospect thinking Tversky and Kahneman are the original thinkers behind prospect theory.

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Run relevant retrospectives!

Kiron Bondale

I wrote a few weeks back that while retrospectives are commonly associated with agile projects they can also be equally useful on traditional ones. So what are some of the elements required to run a successful retrospective? Psychological safety. One of my key learnings from the Agile2016 conference was that psychological safety is the number one requirement for a high performance team and its criticality is evident in ceremonies like standups and retrospectives.

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Are You Ready For The Social Tech Revolution?

Rebel’s Guide to PM

One day your project management status updates might self-destruct. In this article, Jerry Giltenane explains why. Of the 7.3 billion people on the planet, 31% or 2.3 billion people actively use social media to communicate, to share and to build a sense of community. In a parallel universe, some of the key drivers of project management are to communicate, to inform and to develop high performing teams.

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How to Improve Your Project Communication

Project Risk Coach

In my project management workshops, I ask this question, “What are the top causes of project failure?” Nine times out of ten, I hear an answer — among others — related to poor communication. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock (edited in Canva). There are many ways in which project managers communicate — coaching, summarizing action items, influencing a stakeholder, educating team members, listening, facilitating decisions, creating a contract with a third party, escalati

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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.