Sat.Jul 23, 2016 - Fri.Jul 29, 2016

article thumbnail

How I Do It: Communication Tools & Tips

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Today I’m shining a spotlight on how I manage my projects. I’m particularly interested in the communications between people on projects and regular readers will know that, as I cover it a lot. I wanted to tell you how I run stakeholder communications on my projects (I’ve also covered the ‘how’ of stakeholder comms before ). Not because I have amazing results from the strategies I use or anything, but because it’s always interesting to find out how other people do it.

Closing 210
article thumbnail

Nine Awesome Benefits in the World of Stakeholder Management

Project Risk Coach

John, a new project manager, has been failing to exploit and enhance the benefits of stakeholder management. Why? Courtesy of Adobe Stock. John has enough to do without adding superfluous stuff to his projects. He’s not been be convinced of the benefits. If you are a Project Management Professional (PMP), you’ve likely studied Chapter 13 of the Project Management Body of Knowledge – Stakeholder Management , which was added in the Fifth Edition.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Avoid gold-plating through agile delivery

Kiron Bondale

As it is with jewelry, on projects gold-plating is all form with no substance. The increase in costs is rarely justified by the value provided by superficial “bling” It could be an analyst adding in requirements which they came up with on their own without ensuring that those are actually required, a developer who introduces a code change or feature they believe is useful without checking with others or a quality control specialist who decides to test above and beyond approved test p

Agile 149
article thumbnail

About evidence

Musings on Project Management

Did you see this witicism at herdingcats? A skeptic will question claims, then embrace the evidence. A denier will question claims, then reject the evidence. - Neil deGrase Tyson. Think of this whenever there is a conjecture that has no testable evidence of the claim. And think ever more when those making the conjectured claim refuse to provide evidence.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Virtual Leadership [Book Review]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I work in a virtual team. In both my jobs, as a project manager and as a writer, I work in virtual teams, sometimes leading them, sometimes not. That’s why I was keen to read Virtual Leadership by Penny Pullan, and I was lucky enough to get an advance copy before it hit the shelves. I read it in one sitting on a long train journey – it’s easy to get into so it doesn’t feel like hard going to plough through it.

More Trending

article thumbnail

If It Was My Organization

Agile Coach

Taking an idea from The Feedback Wrap , this post was written on a beautiful Sunday night by the pool on the eve of Agile 2016, and after a skimming of “ Why Business People Speak Like Idiots “ I’m in a mellow mood, but feeling a little annoyed with whole world of Agile lately. Remember when good leadership was good leadership? Now it HAS TO be Agile leadership.

Telecoms 145
article thumbnail

Empathy Mapping

Zen Project Management

I ran an exercise at the beginning of a new project last week; Empathy Mapping. This is part of an overall approach of using Design Thinking along with agile development. The idea to empathy mapping is to get to understand your users. Per the diagram below, you want to get an understanding of what your user thinks, says, feels, and does (though I have seen other examples that are slightly different than this).

Budget 130
article thumbnail

Digital PM Summit 12th – 15th Oct 2016, San Antonio

The Digital Project Manager

Posted in General. If you’re wondering how to spend your digital project management training budget this year, look no further than this year’s Digital PM Summit. Set in sunny San Antonio, it’s the place to make new #dpm buddies and mingle with 350 like minded peeps. Tickets start at $999 and for that you’ll get two days of engaging presentations, breakout sessions, and lightning talks exploring how we manage digital projects, from a variety of perspectives.

2016 120
article thumbnail

4 Ways LiquidPlanner Gantt Charts Are Smarter

LiquidPlanner

Since its introduction in the 1910s, the Gantt chart has remained a staple of the project manager’s tool set. Today, it’s still the go-to way of graphically displaying all of the tasks that make up a project and their progress towards completion. Traditionally geared towards the planning of large-scale Waterfall-type engineering projects, Gantt charts are now also being adapted for use in Agile and other more dynamic environments; they’re featured in just about every piece of project management

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

Sustainable Development Goal #3 and Project Management, ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.

Green Project Management

Installment #3 of 17 in our series in which we cover each sustainable development goal (SDG) and how projects and project management can contribute to them. This post focuses on SDG number 3, Good Health and Well-being. Specific Targets of SDG #3 This goal has 13 specific targets which include reducing maternal mortality and preventable […]. The post Sustainable Development Goal #3 and Project Management, ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. appeared first on D

article thumbnail

The Myth of "Discover by Doing"

Herding Cats

There is a popular Agile and No Estimates phrase. It is by doing the work we discover the work we must do. . This of course ignores the notion of engineering or designing a solution to the needed capabilities of the customer. It is certainly the case that some aspects of the software solution can only be confirmed when the working software is available for use.

article thumbnail

How To Ace Job Interviews: 5 Secrets Backed By Research

Project Management Hacks

Image Source: Shutterstock. It’s the moment of truth in any career change: the job interview. You sweat. You prepare and hope for the best. But it usually feels like a black box. That’s going to change with this article. Based on the excellent research from, “ Pedigree: how elite students get elite jobs ,” by Lauren A. Rivera , we’re going to break down job interviews.

article thumbnail

How to Use LiquidPlanner’s Team Dashboard: A Baseball Analogy

LiquidPlanner

In today’s business world, everyone wants data. Which is why project metrics and analytics are such key components of LiquidPlanner. When you diligently enter project and task information into your workspace (estimates, time tracked, etc.), you’re automatically racking up precious project data—the kind that helps make meaningful business decisions, keep stakeholders in the loop, and track projects as they unfold.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Guilty of Annoying Your Stakeholders

Project Risk Coach

This is a guest post from Colin Gautrey, an author, trainer and executive coach who has specialized in the field of power and influence for over ten years. He combines solid research with deep personal experience in corporate life to offer his audiences critical yet simple insights into how to achieve results with greater influence. He is the creator of the Stakeholder Influencing Masterclass.

article thumbnail

Quote of the Day

Herding Cats

Without a Plan, you're making it up as you go. If you make it up as you go, it's the basis of getting it horribly wrong - Salman Rushdie. Related articles. Architecture -Center ERP Systems in the Manufacturing Domain. IT Risk Management. Why Guessing is not Estimating and Estimating is not Guessing.

article thumbnail

About coordination

Musings on Project Management

We're all supposed to coordinate. That's written somewhere in the PM literature and taught in bureaucracy school everywhere. And so I was impressed with this bit of wit: "Successful coordinating mechanisms depend on mutuality. The greatest chance of success derives from mutual benefit tied to sufficiently high priority programs. "[beware of the] weak coordinating level of [just].

174
174
article thumbnail

What Kind of Support Does LiquidPlanner Offer New Customers?

LiquidPlanner

It’s your lucky day! After years of struggling to keep yourself and your team organized, you’ve been given the green light to look for a viable project management solution. Your ideal program will give you reliable schedules and provide you with high-level reports for management and stakeholders alike. So where do you start? There are a lot of PM tools on the market.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

This is how I work

Stepping Into Project Management

When do you wake up every day? What’s your alarm set to? Right now somewhere between 7.30 am-8.00 am. I try to wake up naturally, I leave the curtains open for the sunlight to stream in. Tea or Coffee? Recently switched to tea. I am usually a coffee person for that first cup in the morning. Any rituals to set the tone for the day in the morning? Water my plants and soak up the morning sun for a couple of minutes and some days write in my gratitude journal may be a line or two.

Agile 37
article thumbnail

10 tips for project success: stay positive

The Digital Project Manager

Posted in General Ten Tops Tips. No matter how well you do the right things at the right time, the truth is, a project tragedy is always just around the corner. At some point your project is likely to hit an iceberg – something which started out as seemingly innocuous will threaten to sink the entire project. A disaster like this can very quickly undo all your previous hard work and have a huge timeline and budget implication.

Budget 140
article thumbnail

Podcast 93 – Using LinkedIn to build your personal brand

Fix my Project Chaos

Let’s talk about using LinkedIn to build your personal brand Most professionals now have a LinkedIn profile – but how much thought have they given to the message they are sending to those they connect with? In this podcast, personal branding expert Jane Anderson talks to me about using LinkedIn to build your personal brand […]. The post Podcast 93 – Using LinkedIn to build your personal brand appeared first on Fix My Project Chaos.

52
article thumbnail

10 Draining Tasks You Can Automate to Save More Time | TeamGantt Blog

TeamGantt

Automate these 10 tasks to save more time and get more done.

60
article thumbnail

Acclaim Projects Helps Deliver Innovation Projects on Time and on Budget

This large intercity transportation company for people and freight employs 100+ IT employees and contractors across North America and Europe and spends $10MM annually for approximately 50 inflight projects. The company needed the right financial tools to budget for innovation initiatives and real-time information on spending and forecasting. This transportation company turned to Acclaim Projects by Sopheon to help deliver projects on time and within budget.

article thumbnail

Green Cars, Pink Flamingos and Yellow Journalism

EarthPM

While Volkswagen has been in the press for the emissions-cheating scandal, and while there continues to be linkage between vehicle emissions and climate change, the last thing we need is publicity around ecologically-friendly cars that falsely blames them for other ecological problems. It’s not that we want to be blind to those problems – of course we want the facts.

article thumbnail

Dilbert on taking over a project with no handover

The Digital Project Manager

Posted in General. The post Dilbert on taking over a project with no handover appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

122
122
article thumbnail

Soft Skills

The Tao of Project Management

There are lots of courses available about how to be a project manager, but they tend to concentrate on the hard skills of project management. The Way is all about the soft skills, but what are the soft skills a project manager needs to get things done? Influencing The wise project manager knows he doesn’t have direct authority over the team, so he needs to build trust and respect to get things done.

article thumbnail

Quote of the Day

Herding Cats

If you can't explain what you are doing as a process, then you don't know what you are doing - Deming. Process is the answer to the question How do we do things around here? All organizations should have a widely accepted Process for making decisions. "A New Engineering Profession is Emerging: Decision Coach," IEEE Engineering Management Review , Vol. 44, No. 2, Second Quarter, June 2016.

2016 30
article thumbnail

From Concepts to Actionable Insights: Powering Digital Transformation Success

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

70% of most digital transformation projects fail. Learn how you can quickly improve that success rate. To be successful, digital transformation involves the strategic application of digitalization to improve a business’ entire system of production, procurement, sales, operations, human resources, and financial management. In short, to basically transform the way a company makes money and delivers value to customers.