December, 2018

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Project Risks and Issues – What’s the Difference?

Project Risk Coach

Do you find yourself working overtime, trying to deal with unexpected disruptions? Some negative events that you thought might happen has now occurred. And it's costing you more time and energy than you thought possible. Overwhelmed? Well, let's talk about project risks and issues, the differences, and why it's so important to manage risks. What is Risk?

Risk 265
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Justify yourself!

Kiron Bondale

A project manager asked me this week whether I was aware of any studies which could be used to justify the assignment of a “real” project manager to manage a project as opposed to having this function performed by someone else within a team. While I’m sure PMI and other project management associations have researched this thoroughly, I felt this would be a good topic for an article.

PMI 252
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2019 Project Management Conferences You Won’t Want to Miss

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Project management conferences are a fantastic way to meet new people and improve your skills. I always come away feeling energised about where I am in my career and relieved having met people with similar problems to me. Many conferences have early bird pricing so it is worth checking out the events that interest you as soon as you can in case you need to get corporate funding to attend.

2019 371
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How to Conduct a Feasibility Study

ProjectManager.com

What is a feasibility study and why is it so important for a project? Jennifer Bridges, PMP, explains what project managers need to know about feasibility studies in this short tutorial video. Here’s a screenshot of the whiteboard for your reference! In Review – How to Conduct a Feasibility Study. Jennifer began by clarifying what a feasibility study is.

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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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Agile and the V-and-V thing

Musings on Project Management

Have you thought much about this? Two of the conceptual conundrums of the hybrid methodology project are: How do you verify that which is incomplete and. How do you validate the efficacy of that which is yet to be conceived? Verification and validation (V-and-V) are traditionally held to be very important project practises that are difficult to map directly into the Agile domain.

Agile 247

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How to Create a Project Affinity Map

Project Risk Coach

Have you ever conducted a project brainstorming session and found yourself drowning in a cloud of ideas? Not a bad thing, but how can we make sense of the ideas? Well, let's see how to create a project affinity map to sort your ideas. As a bonus, we'll also look at Dot Voting , a simple and quick way to prioritize your ideas. What is an Affinity Map?

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How effective are your agile ceremonies?

Kiron Bondale

We hope that by conducting effective ceremonies we will achieve the agile trinity of improved value delivery, better quality and more fun. But these objectives might be reached via multiple paths so we might not be able to prove causality between our ceremonies and those objectives. We could ask our team members to tell us whether they see the value in the ceremonies and their perceptions are certainly important but is that enough?

Agile 220
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Thank You 2018

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone that has made Girl’s Guide to Project Management possible this year. It is a big list, but there are so many people working behind the scenes to help this website run smoothly. A very big thank you to… Companies that let me review their software. These companies asked me to review their software this year.

2018 245
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How to Become a Senior Project Manager

ProjectManager.com

Want to become a senior project manager? First you must know how one differs from a typical project manager. Jennifer Bridges, PMP, explains and provides you with practical steps to achieve your career goals. Here’s a screenshot of the whiteboard for your reference! In Review – How to Become a Senior Project Manager. Jennifer said she often receives questions about how to become a senior manager.

Energy 331
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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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An Alternative Approach to Dealing with the Inevitable Team Conflict

LiquidPlanner

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”—Babe Ruth ??. Among the many critical project success factors—detailed plans, accurate estimates, and clear communication—a strong, unified team is arguably one of the most important.

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The Presentation on Presentations

The Lazy Project Manager

A new book for you and your team: How to become a more confident public speaker the ‘Lazy’ way – Available now on Amazon. Am I a public speaking expert? An interesting thought and hardly one that I could answer myself. I could say, with complete accuracy, that I have (at the time of writing this book) delivered 337 presentations of varying formats to a public audience of varying human formats, interests, locations and languages (to over 60,000 people in actual fact).

PMO 221
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How To Write Clear Project Goals

Project Risk Coach

Occasionally, someone will ask me for risk management tips. I think my first answer surprises individuals— write clear goals. Yes, g ood risk management always starts with clear goals. In today's article, I will give you a simple method to write clear goals every time. The Fable of the Crow and the Pitcher The Crow and the Pitcher is one of Aesop’s Fables.

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Is increasing agility a recurring resolution?

Kiron Bondale

As we kickoff the final week of 2018, many of us will be making New Year’s resolutions. While some of these resolutions might relate to achieving a specific goal or objective (e.g. I resolve to run a marathon this year), most relate to changing our behavior (e.g. I resolve to eat healthier this year). But for many of us it becomes a case of déjà vu as we end up making the same resolutions we had confidently made in previous years.

Agile 185
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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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Get a Free 2019 Career Planner

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Is it too early to be thinking about your professional goals for next year? I don’t think so. If you’re anything like me, the first few weeks of January are so hectic with back to work and school, new projects at the office and the general downer from the holidays that I don’t have the focus to spend January planning out my next 12 months.

2019 254
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How to Find a Career Mentor and Why It’s Important

ProjectManager.com

A mentor can help you avoid pitfalls as you maneuver through your career. Jennifer Bridges, PMP, notes how important that relationship is and helps you find a career mentor for yourself. Here’s a screenshot of the whiteboard for your reference. In Review – How to Find a Career Mentor and Why It’s Important. Jennifer began with definitions. Mentor can mean a few different things, so she wanted to clarify its various meanings.

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LeCarre and project mangement

Musings on Project Management

As a former intelligence professional, John LeCarre is one of my favorite authors, to say nothing of the dry British wit and sparkling prose that supports some quite challenging plots. Nonetheless, I didn't expect to find this wisdom on the pages of "Our kind of traitor" In operational planning there are two opportunities only for flexibility: One, when you've drawn up your plan.

Planning 199
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Where is the Manager Role in Scrum?

Scrum.org

The Scrum Framework defines three distinct roles; the Product Owner, the Development Team and the Scrum Master. The scrum guide does elude to Stakeholders, but does not mention anything about managers, executives and leaders. This causes a lot of friction between teams and managers as the role is not clear. Scrum dogmatists then profess that there should be no managers, or scrum has no mangers.

SCRUM 152
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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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Mobile Project Management: InLoox Mobile App for iOS and Android

Inloox

Nowadays we can do a lot on just one device - the smartphone - for which we previously needed several devices: watching TV, listening to the radio, sending emails, taking photos and videos, setting your alarm, and so on and so forth. So it’s not far-fetched that sooner or later we’ll also be planning and controlling projects with our phones. InLoox users could already work on the go with InLoox Web App, but InLoox 10 offers users a new possibility: native apps for iOS and Android devices.

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Product-centric teams have skin in the game!

Kiron Bondale

I’m midway through Nassim Taleb ‘s latest book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. As is usual with Taleb’s writing, he provides thorough but humorous coverage of a concept which can be applied to many contexts. The premise of this book is that without skin in the game, asymmetries emerge which encourage unfairness, poor decision making and can contribute to a lack of understanding of realities.

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Agile for Traditional Projects

The IIL Blog

By Susan Parente | Risk Management Guru – Agile Generalist – Instructor and Consultant, IIL. “Can Agile practices be incorporated with traditional project management?” This is a very common question today, and the answer is yes! In this blog, I’ll cover two great Agile practices that teams have found to be valuable to incorporate on traditional projects, and which may help your team make the shift from traditional to Agile project management: A Daily Stand-up meeting and a Kanban boa

Agile 116
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Quality Assurance and Testing: A Quick Guide

ProjectManager.com

A project isn’t successful just because it has been completed on time and within budget. There is one other factor that is critical to success: quality. No matter how quickly and cheaply a project is completed, stakeholders are not going to be happy if the quality of the product or service doesn’t meet their expectations. So, how can a manager track the quality of their project and make sure it meets the requirements of stakeholders?

Aerospace 358
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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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Meeting the customer's standards

Musings on Project Management

"They" say about Agile: You don't have to bother with gathering requirements; requirements just emerge You don't have to have any documentation; it's all in the code You can do away with V&V: verification and validation, because that's like QA tacked onto the end You don't really have to have an architect, because (somehow) the best architecture emerges Taking responsibility for business.

Agile 186
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Is Scrum hurting your agility?

Scrum.org

By Chris Lukassen & Sjoerd Kranendonk. By now, most organisations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organisation has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organization structure to potentially get maximum benefit from Scrum.

SCRUM 134
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Best of 2018: Presenting Your 10 Favorite Blog Posts This Year!

Inloox

There was a lot going on at InLoox in 2018, which is also reflected on the InLoox blog. From all the posts on various topics around project management , time management , organizational agility , disruptive trends and professions in project management , you particularly liked these 10: #10: Digital Transformation Projects (2): Opportunities and Challenges of Digitalization Digital transformation breaks with tradition and replaces obsolete processes with newer and more efficient ones.

2018 125
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5 Steps to Master Sprint Planning: Template, Checklist and Guide

Planio

Sprints are the backbone of any good Agile development team. And the better prepared you are before a sprint, the more likely you are to hit your goals. Spring planning helps to refocus attention, minimize surprises, and (hopefully) guarantee better code gets shippied. But maybe more than that, sprint planning aligns the development team with the product owner.

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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.