2018

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How To Start Your Projects Right. A Complete Guide To Project Initiation

The Digital Project Manager

The beginning of a project: the calm before the storm or a manic rush to get things sorted ready for the core work to start? Whichever way it happens, the start of a project is critical to its future success. From estimating and scoping, to assigning resource, defining requirements, briefing in your team, the all important first meeting with the client—there’s a minefield of tasks out there which can shape how your project develops.

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Six Sigma: A Simple Guide for Project Managers

ProjectManager.com

It’s been around for three decades, but Six Sigma can still be somewhat of an enigma. It can mean different things within various organizations or circumstances, but there is a way to broadly outline this business process improvement methodology and define its beginnings, its, rise, its use and its implementation. There has been some backlash against Six Sigma over the recent years, some of which is warranted and will be discussed, but overall the process proves a valuable tool in reducing defec

Lean 417
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How to Prioritize Work When Everything Is #1

LiquidPlanner

All projects—especially large, complex projects—need clear priorities. Easier said than done. You can count on technical projects, no matter how well-planned, to involve change orders, re-prioritization and the regular appearance of surprises. It’s just the natural order of things. But still. Knowing how to prioritize work affects the success of your project, the engagement of your team, and your role as a leader.

Estimate 1089
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We need to spend more time educating our clients

Ron Rosenhead

I have worked in many companies delivering project management training where there appears to be an issue with my clients complaining that their clients keep changing the specification of work. In order to dig a little deeper I have asked my own clients ask a number of simple questions: What have you done to really tease out client needs/expectations?

Budget 244
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From Predictive to Agile: How to Choose the Right Project Management Methodology

Our profession is undergoing a transformation, moving away from rigid, one-size-fits-all methodologies. Instead, project managers are embracing dynamic and adaptable frameworks that carefully consider project and product variables to determine the most suitable development approaches and project life cycles.

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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 345

More Trending

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The Qualities of a Good Project Manager

Prince2

Understandably, we believe that being certified in project management is a sure-fire way to boost your career chances, knowledge of best practice and overall skillset. However, without the right personal skills, a qualification can only take you so far. We’ve pulled together 4 essential attributes you can use to take your PM skills from good to great.

Prince2 339
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What is a Stakeholder in Project Management?

Planio

If it takes a village to raise a child, then it’s safe to say it takes a whole city to run a project. No matter how agile and lean you try to run your projects there are inevitably going to be a lot of people involved in getting you from project proposal to launch day. One very important group of these people are your project stakeholders. What exactly is a project stakeholder?

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Transformation is More Than Just Having an Agile Checklist

Leading Agile

As a consultant, I get to see a lot of different organizations and work with a variety of teams. By now, virtually everyone has at least heard of agile and read the manifesto. We also seem to have, in technology adoption terms, crossed the chasm, and so adoption by more traditional, sometimes slower moving, global scale organizations is well under way.

Agile 285
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Delphi Technique In Project Management (How to + Example)

PM Basics

Talked with the client yesterday. He asked me to look into a new technology on iOS called “layers” He wanted to see if we can leverage it. I had no idea what was that. For sure, I could open a developer’s documentation and try to read it. But that is not what a project manager does. Instead, I decided to apply the Delphi Technique. Here is what I did.

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ERM Program Fundamentals for Success in the Banking Industry

Speaker: William Hord, Senior VP of Risk & Professional Services

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is critical for industry growth in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing risk landscape. When building your ERM program foundation, you need to answer questions like: Do we have robust board and management support? Do we understand and articulate our bank’s risk appetite and how that impacts our business units? How are we measuring and rating our risk impact, likelihood, and controls to mitigate our risk?

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Can Persuasive Sales Representative Become the Future Leads in Project Management

Taskque

Sales professionals and project managers are professionally worlds apart. However, who could’ve thought that people in sales have the potential to actually turn into a really successful project manager? Well, for starters, I experienced it. Carmichael Jordan, a Caucasian male, living in the suburbs of Arlington, TX has consistently been performing his day to day activities by serving his role as a lead inside sales representative at Jacobs, a construction, repair & maintenance company.

Budget 212
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10 Of the Best Scrum Tools to Increase Your Team’s Productivity

The Digital Project Manager

Compare the best Scrum tools by pricing, features, integrations, and pros & cons in this expert project management review. These tools facilitate the Scrum framework, encouraging collaboration, transparency, and efficiency among your team. The post 10 Of the Best Scrum Tools to Increase Your Team’s Productivity appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

SCRUM 285
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The 7 Habits of Successful Project Managers

ProjectManager.com

There’s a hugely successful book that you’ve probably heard of and may have read called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. It identifies seven habits that can help people be more effective in personal and professional environments. But what habits apply specifically to successful project managers? Well, let’s start by acknowledging the value of good habits in general.

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Will a Project Management Certification Help Your Career?

LiquidPlanner

Let’s say you’re well-qualified in your technical skills—be it Java, programming languages, infrastructure, networks or system administration. Qualifications take time and effort, but as well as learning useful skills, you’re also building confidence—your own and the others’ confidence in your ability to do a great job. But what if you’re switching from a purely technical role to one that involves managing projects?

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The Definitive Guide to Dashboard Design

Dashboard design can mean the difference between users excitedly embracing your product or ignoring it altogether. Great dashboards lead to richer user experiences and significant return on investment (ROI), while poorly designed dashboards distract users, suppress adoption, and can even tarnish your project or brand. That’s one of the many reasons we wrote The Definitive Guide to Dashboard Design—to help you avoid common pitfalls, including… Cramming too much onto one screen and expecting the u

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CSM certification guide: Certified ScrumMaster exam explained

Moira Alexander

What is the CSM certification? Agile practices are being rapidly adopted in project and product management across many industries, and the Scrum master is an important leadership role in agile development. The Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) qualification, available through the Scrum Alliance, is an entry-level certification aimed at providing professionals with an awareness of the methodologies and values of Scrum, including team performance, accountability, and iterative progress.

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Business Analyst & Project Manager Relationship: Collaborate for Success

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This is a guest post by Laura Brandenburg, describing how to get the best out of the project manager and business analyst relationship. Before I forget, I want to be sure you know about Laura’s Quick Start to Success as a Business Analyst training (it’s free) that’s designed to help you business analysts achieve more success on their projects. . We all want more successful projects – projects that deliver their intended business value and are delivered on time and on budget.

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What is the scope of a project to plan a successful project

Proofhub

Project Scope Management: What is the Scope of a Project When you’re kicking off a new initiative like building a construction site or any such project, the constructor has to define the boundaries of construction as such. They raise a fence on the site that is called scoping(defining the boundaries). A successful project scope statement is concise and clear.

Planning 180
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The Pareto Principle is alive and well in project management

Ron Rosenhead

So let’s start with a definition or an understanding of the ‘Pareto Principle’? “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes.”. Let me give you an example of how I used this many years ago. I was the training manager in a company that had a centralised typing pool (I did say it was many years ago).

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How to Battle Layoffs: The Career Star Accelerator Bootcamp

Facing layoffs in your organization? Support your team members' career transition with Career Star Accelerator Bootcamp: Custom Resume & LinkedIn Revamp + 6 Weeks of Career Coaching. Our certified resume writers will create job search-winning resumes and LinkedIn profiles while they work with a career coach to learn unique strategies to stand out, attract the right employers, automate their job search, and land their dream job.

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How to memorize the 49 processes from PMBOK 6th Edition in under 30 minutes

ExamsPM

The Project Management Institute (PMI) offers certifications that provide project management professionals with both information and credibility. Two of these certifications are the Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM). Both of these certifications are based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) which outlines the PMI approach to managing projects.

Process 167
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Continuous Unit Checking:Part Three

Leading Agile

Where were we? Part 1 : Command-line utilities and wrapper scripts. Part 2 : Guard (with Ruby) and SBT (with Scala). Part 3 (this): Infinitest (with Java and IntelliJ IDEA). In Part 1, we looked at some simple continuous checking solutions based on shell commands and wrapper scripts. In Part 2, we climbed up the pile of tools a bit and tried out guard (Ruby) and sbt (Scala).

Defining 179
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online task management software is enabler

Binfire

Do you have tasks that you need to do every day? Managing tasks should not be a pain. With the advent of online task management software , managing work just got easier. Let’s start by defining what is a task? Task simply means any work that needs to be undertaken to achieve the desired result. So, buying milk is a task, taking kids to school is another task and so on.

Software 143
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Rogue Project Sponsor: What to Do when Sponsorship goes Bad

Online PM Courses

One of the things that can make your life most difficult is a rogue Project Sponsor. It’s like they have turned to the dark side. And it feels as if they no longer have your project’s best interests at heart. Let me start by re-assuring you… A truly rogue Project Sponsor is not common. . So, why should you read this? . For two reasons: Because, if it does happen to you, you need to be prepared.

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Unlocking Business Agility: Leveraging the Power of Strategy Execution

True business agility is impossible if execution is disconnected from strategic planning. Download this eBook to learn about the 12 key imperatives every organization must address, and discover how they impact the capabilities you’ll need to effectively deliver execution across all investments.

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RACI Made Simple. How To Create A Responsibility Assignment Matrix That Actually Works

The Digital Project Manager

You hear the term RACI, and inwardly groan. Far from the slightly exciting sounding acronym, The post RACI Made Simple. How To Create A Responsibility Assignment Matrix That Actually Works appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

Planning 317
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Project Quality Management – A Quick Guide

ProjectManager.com

When you’re managing a project, the Triple Constraint is always foremost in your head. How can you control the scope, schedule and cost of the project? But there is a fourth concern that is just as important and is sometimes forgotten in the maelstrom of project management, and that is quality. It doesn’t matter if you got the best project management tools , met every milestone and completed the project under budget if the deliverable didn’t meet quality standards.

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5 Reasons Why Using Spreadsheets is a Horrible Way to Manage Projects

LiquidPlanner

Once in my career, I was lucky enough to work with a true Excel spreadsheet master. Chris could make Excel do anything, except he never used spreadsheets to manage a project. He was a wise man. Since then I’ve come across too many project professionals, teams and organizations who stretch Microsoft Excel into a project management tool, and unsuccessfully so.

Agile 772
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Growing as a Product Owner: Five Product Owner Maturity-Levels

Scrum.org

The Product Owner role is implemented in organizations in various different ways. The responsibilities and authorities of Product Owners vary across organizations, departments, teams and Product Owners. This can be explained to some extend, because it is a role that people need to grow into. The role requires some specific competences and a specific mindset.

SCRUM 171
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How Modern Paralegals Are Implementing Project Management Principles

Speaker: Michael Quartararo - Managing Director at eDPM Advisory Services and President of ACEDS

The paralegal and project management fields may seem totally unique from each other, but in reality, they have many overlapping similarities when it comes to personal characteristics and everyday tasks. In fact, they have enough in common that project management methodologies and principles can help paralegals complete essential tasks.

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Untapped Powers of Micromanagement in Project Management

PM Basics

“It looks like a micromanagement to me,” Corwin said just as we left the room. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “Micromanagement is a bad technique, isn’t it?” Corwin was surprised. Micromanagement got a bad reputation. It is a tool of evil project managers ! Only despotic leaders use it! Nevertheless, I believe the micromanagement technique is a powerful tool.

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9 Steps to Build a Go To Market Strategy (Framework and Examples)

Planio

It’s probably safe to say that every company wants to grow. Yet while growth can come from wildly different sources, they all share one quality: Without a solid strategy, you’re going to spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere. Nowhere is this more true than when you’re trying to launch a new product and break into the market.

Strategy 167
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Kanban to manage Complex/ Quick Moving Situations

Digite

Is this you? That is, does the question below, which I answered on a technical forum recently, describe a situation you might be facing or may have faced in the past? We have a brownfield project which was recently struck by disaster (many people leaving for unrelated reasons, too many new customers, much too large backlog for much to few people, etc.).

SCRUM 154