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Timing is everything for your team!
Kiron Bondale
MAY 27, 2018
Those of us who have managed projects with team members dispersed across distant time zones are well aware of the risks caused by geographic, cultural and temporal distance.
Kiron Bondale
Impacts of traditional project funding models on agile delivery
Kiron Bondale
JUNE 16, 2018
In one of my previous articles I’d written about the need for change across multiple areas of an organization when undertaking an agile transformation.
Gantt charts still have a place in the agile-verse!
Kiron Bondale
MAY 21, 2018
Those of you who have followed me for a while will know that I value pragmatism over absolutism when it comes to delivery practices, tools and techniques. Pick the right tool for the right job should be a guiding principle followed by all project teams. Easier said than done!
How many concurrent projects following an agile delivery approach can your company sustain?
Kiron Bondale
MAY 13, 2018
Organizations that are in the midst of an agile transformation will often track how many projects within their portfolios are being delivered following an agile lifecycle.
Task Management For Project Managers
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How can project planning that stretches over months or years remain relevant and account for new ad-hoc activities that arrive every day?
What’s your project management personal best?
Kiron Bondale
APRIL 29, 2018
Outside of professional arenas, in sports such as weight-lifting, our competition is from within and not without. Committed gym rats are keenly aware of how much weight they can lift, push or pull for each of the muscle groups in their workout rotation.
Be disciplined!
Kiron Bondale
JUNE 9, 2018
If you are sensing a theme here, you probably are. After writing about the importance of courage for project managers and team members last week, I thought I’d cover another important characteristic, especially for those working on projects which follow an agile delivery approach: discipline.
Shouldn’t we ALL be agile project managers?
Kiron Bondale
MARCH 4, 2018
I always get a kick out of online discussions referencing agile project managers as if those are some special subset of the project management population!
What do you ask when interviewing project managers?
Kiron Bondale
FEBRUARY 25, 2018
I’ve written previously about what I look for when reviewing project manager resumes as well as what I look for when hiring for these positions. Testing a candidate’s knowledge of hard or soft skills provides limited benefit to the hiring process.
Managing The Project Budget - Developing Your Project Management Skills
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This eBook describes the process of managing the project budget and its associated costs.
Cultivating psychological safety happens one person at a time…
Kiron Bondale
APRIL 1, 2018
Since 2015 when Google’s research identified psychological safety as one of the key attributes of high performing teams, it has received a lot of airtime.
Have we learned anything?
Kiron Bondale
FEBRUARY 11, 2018
In a recent role, I had the opportunity to review the lessons submitted by teams running large, complex projects and programs and found that over 90% of what was being captured and shared was of low or no value.
Does your company recognize “Here, there be (project) dragons”?
Kiron Bondale
JANUARY 14, 2018
Over time companies tend to take on projects with increasing levels of complexity. This happens either as a side benefit of a boost in organizational project management maturity, reactively when responding to regulatory or competitive pressures or organically as an outcome of strategic planning.
Why setup virtual PMOs and when should PM templates be standardized?
Kiron Bondale
MARCH 18, 2018
Dear reader, don’t be alarmed – this IS your regularly scheduled article! I’d like to thank Sante Vergini for providing the inspiration for the first topic and the second one had been a splinter in my mind so I couldn’t wait till next week to write about it. Why oh why would someone set up a virtual PMO? In one of my past articles , I had written about the challenges of establishing and running virtual PMOs.
The Manifesto’s missing link: Valuing agility over agendas
Kiron Bondale
APRIL 15, 2018
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development gave us four values supported by a dozen guiding principles.
Top 5 Project Management Report Templates
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These FREE most popular templates will help you perform your role more efficiently.
How do YOU define project failure?
Kiron Bondale
OCTOBER 8, 2017
An early project management lesson learned is that it is a good practice to start with the end in mind, especially when it comes to defining what done looks like.
Are your agile transformation blockers like agents in The Matrix?
Kiron Bondale
MARCH 10, 2018
Agile transformations are susceptible to a variety of impediments but sometimes these hurdles are not as high as we believe them to be. In almost any company other than a startup, some or all of the following tangible blockers will not only be present at the beginning of the journey, they may continue to stymie teams years into their transformation. The inability to dedicate primary roles (e.g. Product Owners, Agile Leads) to a single value stream.
The not so minimum Minimum Viable Product
Kiron Bondale
OCTOBER 16, 2016
Through their Lean Startup work, Steve Blank and Eric Ries have popularized the idea of focusing on delivering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which will meet a customer’s core needs while minimize investment and providing opportunities for learning, refinement and the ability to fail fast.
Maintain a sense of change urgency through agility
Kiron Bondale
FEBRUARY 4, 2018
According to John Kotter’s model for leading change, the first step to overcoming inertia requires us to instill a sense of true urgency in those we need to support, implement and sustain the change.
A Guide to Designing Delightful Dashboards
Speaker: Daniel O'Sullivan, Product Designer, nCino and Jeff Hudock, Senior Product Manager, nCino
We’ve all seen the increasing industry trend of artificial intelligence and big data analytics. In a world of information overload, it's more important than ever to have a dashboard that provides data that's not only interesting but actually relevant and timely. Dashboards assist decision makers facilitate new ideas and business opportunities, increase customer approval rates, and analyze current business process. All of these activities play a vital role in providing the superior experience your customers demand.
The future is CAPM (and I DON’T mean PMI’s designation!)
Kiron Bondale
NOVEMBER 5, 2017
Many professions are starting to face the threats and opportunities created by machine learning. For those who view the glass as being half-empty, a very real threat is that jobs which can be automated and performed more efficiently will diminish over time.
How successful is your sprint planning?
Kiron Bondale
MARCH 25, 2018
Sprint planning is one of the standard events within the Scrum framework. This ceremony or an adapted version has also been incorporated within other agile delivery frameworks which time-box the work of teams. The purpose of the ceremony is to align the team on what they will be working on during the upcoming sprint to ensure that their efforts are focused on delivering the highest priority work items in a quality manner while maintaining a sustainable pace of work.
Are you a (psychologically) safe project manager?
Kiron Bondale
OCTOBER 2, 2016
Psychological safety is a key ingredient in the formation of high performance teams. Empowerment, recognition, flexible work time or place arrangements and free food can all help but these amount to very little if team members feel afraid to be express vulnerability or to be themselves.
How effective is your benefits management framework?
Kiron Bondale
DECEMBER 17, 2017
Benefits management, like project risk management, is practiced poorly by most organizations. While project intake processes usually require some articulation of expected benefits, few companies effectively monitor and control the realization of those benefits over the life of a project and beyond.
Turning Metrics into Dollars: How to Turn Your Analytics Data into a Real Financial Model for your Startup
Speaker: Tristan Kromer, Lean Agile Coach, Kromatic
Some teams struggle to constantly optimize conversion rates without understanding the financial impact of those conversion rates. Sometimes that 0.1% increase isn't worth the engineering time we're spending! Early stage startups in particular may not need a four year business plan, but they need to start building out a model which will show how they can someday be profitable. At the very least, they need to be able to see the impact of a change in retention rates to their user growth.
In defense of the Digraph
Kiron Bondale
OCTOBER 29, 2017
I’ve found project risk management to be one of the weakest performed PMBOK knowledge areas in most organizations, even for those companies whose operational risk management practices are very mature.
How comical is your project?
Kiron Bondale
DECEMBER 3, 2017
Frequent readers of my blog will know how much I respect Scott Adams’s unique insights into the dysfunctions of corporate life. Let’s analyze the case study provided in today’s comic strip! Risk (mis)management.
Kanbanize your personal development resolutions for 2018!
Kiron Bondale
JANUARY 7, 2018
The new year is a time for making resolutions and most people’s lists are likely to include some behavior-related ones (e.g. I resolve to eat only one dessert with dinner!) as well as some goal-oriented ones (e.g.
RBS is one more technique for your estimation tool belt!
Kiron Bondale
FEBRUARY 18, 2018
Project managers need to be comfortable with different estimation techniques. Foundational project management courses will teach you about analogous, bottom-up, parametric and three-point estimating.
How Agile Approaches Change Project, Program, and Product Measures
Speaker: Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, Rothman Consulting Group
Before agile approaches took the world by storm, we used Gantt charts and defects to measure project and program progress. We had trouble measuring product progress until just before release—often too late to change anything. Join Johanna as she discusses how agile approaches change what we measure, and possible measures you might use in projects, programs, and to assess the product as the team(s) build it.
In defense of Critical Chain
Kiron Bondale
OCTOBER 15, 2017
One of the more subtle changes in the Sixth Edition of the PMBOK Guide is the elimination of all references to Critical Chain Method (CCM).
Risk management for agile projects
Kiron Bondale
SEPTEMBER 25, 2016
What are the implications to project risk management when you choose to deliver a project using an agile approach? Here are a few similarities: Risk needs to be managed through the project’s lifetime, not just at the very beginning.
Who is the Cassandra on YOUR project?
Kiron Bondale
NOVEMBER 12, 2017
I’m currently reading Richard A. Clarke and R. Eddy’s book Warnings which analyzes a number of cases where a credible subject matter expert raised concerns proactively about a looming catastrophe but was ignored until it was too late to take preventative action.
How do we encourage organizational adoption of an agile mindset?
Kiron Bondale
JANUARY 28, 2018
Changing mindset is all the rage in the agile community.
Selling Data and Decisions to your Team
Speaker: Cait Porte, SVP Product and Customer Experience, Zmags
Gathering support for a product feature or enhancement is a critical skill for Product Managers. Talking to customers, working with key stakeholders in the business and convincing development that a feature is necessary can be a daunting task. Join Product Management expert Cait Porte as she covers how to sell your ideas internally by leveraging data to drive decision making.
Exploiting team building opportunities within your project management ceremonies
Kiron Bondale
DECEMBER 10, 2017
While focusing on the triple constraint and keeping stakeholders engaged are crucial, building a high performing team is an essential ingredient of project success. Unfortunately there are at least two forces which work against team building events – time and cost constraints.
So how’s your agile transformation going?
Kiron Bondale
JANUARY 21, 2018
If your organization is in the midst of an agile transformation, ideally this change was justified through a business case which articulated expected benefits and the means by which those benefits would be measured. But we rarely live in an ideal world.
To avoid a dire fate, don’t forget to iterate!
Kiron Bondale
SEPTEMBER 17, 2017
Anyone who has read the PMBOK Guide or taken the PMP exam knows that project management is made up of an interconnected and iterative set of processes. Even a highly predictable project requires a team to iterate back to earlier executed processes when faced with a change request.
Improving portfolio management must be part of an agile transformation
Kiron Bondale
SEPTEMBER 4, 2017
When we think of an agile transformation, improving portfolio management might not be high on the organization’s list of priorities. But what happens if your organization doesn’t have an effective and efficient portfolio management capability?
Agile Metrics for Team and Product Progress
Speaker: Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, Rothman Consulting Group
You’ve seen team metrics like velocity. Velocity is not an accurate measure of a team's progress towards "done." So what should you use instead? Join Johanna as she discusses the measures that are actually useful in understanding what your team does, where the work is, and how long the work really takes - and in addition, we’ll examine what it takes to explain the team’s progress to others in terms of the product backlog burnup chart, ways to talk about what’s done and not yet released, and how to show others working product.
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