April, 2017

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How to Improve the Performance of Your Project Teams

Project Risk Coach

Ever watched what happens when a new team is formed? Maybe you’ve seen a new team of little league baseball players, a music group, a civic group, or a business team. The initial dynamics can be rather rocky and uncertain, even with skilled individuals. Imagine a new project team that was formed to consolidate customer service centers from 20 locations across the United States to five regional locations.

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Software Review: Roadmap Planner [2017]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

General Information. Name: Roadmap Planner. Vendor: KeepSolid Inc. Hosting options: iOS and macOS downloads (no Windows option yet). Cost and plans: Free plan (for one user only) then monthly subscriptions from $4.99 per month and costs go down if you scale with more users and more functionality. There are also discounts in you pay annually. Languages: English.

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Free project management certifications

Moira Alexander

Founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, edX is one of the biggest MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platforms available and offers many project management (PM) courses. You can take individual courses at no charge, and many of them can be accredited towards an edX credential. Here are just some of the PM courses available to students and professionals.

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Challenging Change

The Lazy Project Manager

The following is a guest article from my friends at Tailwind Project Solutions: In his new book – How to get Fired at the C-Level: Why mismanaging change is the biggest risk of all – Peter Taylor challenges the foundations of organisational change, asking if the c-level executives out there are truly ready for change to be successful in their own businesses?

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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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A Project Team’s Guide to Data Conversion: Book Review & Interview with Dave Gordon

Project Bliss

For full disclosure, this article contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosure page. However, I have purchased this book myself and can honestly highly recommend it. . When thinking of software projects, many things come to mind: requirements, writing or configuring code, testing, getting that new system implemented and perhaps getting off that old legacy system that’s outdated and no longer serves your needs.

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How to Recognize and Reward Your Project Teams

Project Risk Coach

People grow tired of working for unappreciative organizations. If it goes on long enough, the top performers get frustrated and leave. Therefore, it’s important to develop a culture of appreciation. But rewards and recognition can be tricky. People are motivated in different ways. John may be thrilled by his challenging project work and the opportunity to learn something new.

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The 7-S Framework: Project Management Remix

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I’m happy to be bringing you this article from Atif Shahab today, sponsored by TaskQue. When it comes to project management things can move really quickly, and sometimes that means things get out of hand. When you’ve got a lot to do, ensuring that your project is aligned to your organisational goals becomes even more important – it’s too easy to let slip that strategic alignment that we have heard so much about in the project management press over the past year or so.

2017 183
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Debt is not all bad

Musings on Project Management

Debt is not all bad; it's not living beyond you means if you have the means -- and commitment and discipline -- to pay it back. In fact, debt can be a source of leverage, a means of managing risk, and a means to bring the future closer to the present. And so it is in the metaphor of technical debt in a project. Technical debt has been around as long as there have been projects.

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Agile In The Agency. Is It Possible?

The Digital Project Manager

Managing agile projects in an agency setting can be challenging, but with the following processes, it can be done. As a Project Manager, you have. The post Agile In The Agency. Is It Possible? appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

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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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Challenging the C-Level Executives

The Lazy Project Manager

How to get Fired at the C-level goes beyond the constraints of a book. To that end the author offers some focused workshops, keynote presentations and insightful supporting education to help organisations achieve the success in strategic change that they desire, and to help C-level executives understand the challenge and benefit from the opportunity.

Executing 186
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What are your sprint goals?

Kiron Bondale

Breaking projects into time boxes known as sprints or iterations is often associated with agile delivery approaches but can also be used to deliver on detailed requirements for an overall project’s scope following the (infamous) approach commonly termed “Water-scrum-fall” The benefit of this approach is that it helps to focus a delivery team on a small, achievable set of work items, providing stakeholders with frequent opportunities to provide feedback on completed work items w

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How to Facilitate a Successful Project Launch

Project Risk Coach

What does it take to facilitate a successful project launch? Let’s look at two scenarios, one that results in potential failure and one destined for success. The Wonder Wheels Company assigned Tom Dooley to manage a high-profile project, a project critical to the achievement of the company’s annual goals. Jane Johnson, a senior leader and the project sponsor, called Tom to her office, handed him a few memos and described the project deliverables.

Executing 225
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Software Review: Roadmap Planner [2017]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

General Information. Name: Roadmap Planner. Vendor: KeepSolid Inc. Hosting options: iOS and macOS downloads (no Windows option yet). Cost and plans: Free plan (for one user only) then monthly subscriptions from $4.99 per month and costs go down if you scale with more users and more functionality. There are also discounts in you pay annually. Languages: English.

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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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Words matter -- anti-Agile dictionary

Musings on Project Management

Peter Hyde has a great piece in Front Row Agile about the ever emerging linguistics of the Agilists. He has his "top 10" of anti-Agile words and phrases. Here are a few from his list that would make my list (by the way, Hyde is looking for more, so if you have a favorite, get in touch with him) Agile in Name Only, or AINO: Companies that have adopted agile frameworks and practises without.

Agile 150
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Tool Review: 10,000ft Plans

The Digital Project Manager

There’s an ongoing debate about how project management tools will fit into the future of work. As digital PMs, we’re needing to adapt to the. The post Tool Review: 10,000ft Plans appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

Planning 123
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The PMO Series (2): The Most Important Project Management Office Roles

Inloox

A quick reminder: In the first part of this series , we’ve already established what a PMO is and what its function in an organization is: ". The project management office is responsible for the overall project management controlling and for the maintenance of project management systems for the entire organization. It supports all projects of an organization and offers tools and other resources, such as project assistance, standards and guidelines, to all project managers. ".

PMO 100
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What stories do your charts tell?

Kiron Bondale

Organizing the delivery of project scope into sprints provides stakeholders with an opportunity to objectively assess progress at regular intervals. Comparing what was delivered against what remains in the overall release or project backlog helps us understand when we might be done. Looking at what the team was able to complete in relation to what they committed to complete at the beginning of the sprint can help us assess their self-discipline and delivery maturity.

Agile 120
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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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How Do You Respond to Project Conflicts?

Project Risk Coach

Project managers, team members, and other stakeholders have disagreements, some heated, some not. What’s important is how you respond to project conflicts? Conflicts can be beneficial if handled in an open, transparent manner. Successful project managers do not run away from conflict; they run toward it. They call it out by name in a neutral and unoffending manner.

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20 Things For Your Project Management Plan [With 3 Free Templates]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Your project management plan is more than just a schedule of work. Although I am guilty of using ‘plan’ and ‘Gantt chart’ interchangeably. So what does go in the project management plan? Below you’ll find 20 things that make up a comprehensive project management plan. Be pragmatic though. Pick and choose what is relevant to you. If you aren’t buying anything, then don’t waste time producing a procurement plan that says as much.

Planning 178
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Integrated product teams

Musings on Project Management

The US DoD has had the concept of the Integrated Product Team (IPT) for a couple of decades. If you search "Crosstalk, the journal of defense software engineering", you'll find zillions of articles that reference the IPT. And, if you search www.dau.mil, you'll also find a wealth of material. As the agile folks go about with multi-functional and persistent teams, they'll find that's an idea.

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The Magic 7 Project Portfolio Management Process Steps

Project-Management.pm

Countless business articles have provided you viable information regarding project portfolio management , accompanied by its objective, the roles of the portfolio manager, and the benefits of the project portfolio management as a whole. But how does one exactly execute project portfolio management? There are the basic ways to steer it to the right direction, but is there a definitive step to it?

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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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The PMO Series (1): Definition and Function of a Project Management Office

Inloox

First off: The acronym “PMO” has many different meanings. Some use it to talk about the project management office, while others mean program management office or portfolio management office. In this blog series, however, we will use the acronym PMO to describe the project management office. Definition PMO The project management office is responsible for the overall project management controlling and for the maintenance of project management systems for the entire organization.

PMO 100
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Agile project management- A tutorial

Binfire

The Agile project management methodology has been used in the software development and IT industry for the past sixteen years, but recently it has gained wide acceptance by many number of industries and organizations. The reason for this surge in popularity is quite understandable, a majority of projects benefit when managed using lean concepts promoted by Agile project management methodology.

Agile 100
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How to Develop a Human Resource Management Plan

Project Risk Coach

Do you throw up your hands in frustration when assigned project teams? Perhaps you’ve had the thought—I rarely get the cream of the crop. How can I be successful when I’m given these motley crews? How is it that some coaches, leaders, and yes even project managers can take a rag-tag group and shape them into a high-performing team? It’s not an accident.

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Inspiring Women in Project Management: Karen Chovan

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Today I’m interviewing Karen Chovan, MASc, PEng, PMP, who has dedicated her career to helping others deliver clean, lean and green approaches to project and programme management. Karen started out in heavy industry – mining – and is now Principal at Enviro Integration Strategies , a firm that helps companies get tangible value from doing the right thing for the planet.

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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.

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Hey Project Manager, are you a more of a Jedi or a Stormtrooper?

Green Project Management

This past week I was having a conversation with a colleague on what they should look for in a project manager. Out of curiosity, I did some digging across various organization’s standards at what they describe as the “role of a project manager”, here is what I found. First I looked in PMI’s PMBOK Guide Version 5 where […]. The post Hey Project Manager, are you a more of a Jedi or a Stormtrooper?

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