June, 2018

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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 416
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7 Ways To Stay Motivated & Productive During the Summer At Work

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Once the weather starts to change and temperatures start to heat up, project managers from all industries start to have something in common: it’s hard to stay motivated on your project when you’d rather be outside! I am not an ‘outside’ person. But I still find it difficult to stay focused on project board minutes or tracking risks when it’s nice out.

Energy 323
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Project Management for Entrepreneurs: Basic Tools for Successful Projects

Project Bliss

If you’re an entrepreneur or consultant who feels overwhelmed and wants to have more control over your work, project management can be a big help to your startup or consulting work. “But isn’t that just more work to do?” you ask. Not necessarily. Using some smart approaches can save you time and money if you can work more efficiently.

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The 4 Scrum Ceremonies Made Simple. A Quick Guide To Scrum Meetings

The Digital Project Manager

Scrum ceremonies are important elements of the agile software delivery process. They are not just. The post The 4 Scrum Ceremonies Made Simple. A Quick Guide To Scrum Meetings appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

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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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Project Risk Management: Do You Have the Facts?

Project Risk Coach

Are your projects rooted in facts or hearsay? Knowing the facts puts you in the driver's seat. Why? Because the facts provide points of reference in which we can better judge the significance of things and where there is uncertainty. So, where do facts come into play in risk management? rocket. “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

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How to Ask for a Raise (and Get One)

ProjectManager.com

With an ever expanding global workforce and a recent emphasis on bigger checks for upper management, raises for reliable employees can be hard to come by, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t getting them. They’re just not handed out as freely. But the cost of living continues to rise, and if your salary isn’t following in kind, then you’re losing money.

Lean 279
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Social Skills for Project Managers: Interview with Geoff Crane [Video]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

How do you gain influence with body language? What should you be aware of for managing stress in the workplace as a project manager? Geoff Crane and I discuss all that, plus better listening and manspreading! There’s a transcript below if you prefer to read more about our chat. Elizabeth: Hello everyone, It’s Elizabeth here, and today, I am at the PMO conference in London with wonderful Geoff Crane who’s come over from Canada.

PMO 205
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Do This Each Day to Keep Your Projects Moving Forward

Project Bliss

If you’re managing multiple projects at once, it can be easy to give all your attention to the most difficult projects. It’s easy to stay focused on the riskiest, or the one with the loudest customer, or the most complex. There are times when you may need to manage multiple projects at once. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to devote all their attention to just one project.

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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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Strategic Finance Essentials: A Project Manager’s Guide to Financial Impact

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 expendi

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Be disciplined!

Kiron Bondale

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. Merriam-Webster offers a number of definitions for discipline including a few which I’m not overly fond of such as “ Control gained by enforcing obedience or order ” and “ Puni

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10 Ways to Become a Better Project Manager

Project Risk Coach

Are you a better project manager today than you were a year ago? In what ways do you want to grow in the next year? Schedule management. Cost management. Requirements management. Leadership. In his book Talent Is Overrated , Geoffrey Colvin says simply doing an activity is no guarantee that you’ll do it well, much less get better at it. In a significant number of cases, people get worse at their jobs over time.

PMI 199
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10 Ways to Cope with a Lazy Coworker

ProjectManager.com

Lazy coworkers — there’s at least one in every office. They’re the ones who come in late, take a long lunch and leave early. They always have an excuse to explain their behavior and can even be apologetic. But what good is saying sorry if the actions remain the same? These actions can be annoying, but if the lazy coworker doesn’t impact your work, then simply avoid them.

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How to Thrive as an Accidental Project Manager [Video interview]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

In this video I talk to Simon Harris about how to thrive as an accidental project manager. We discuss how people find themselves in a project management role, why stepping up can give you new opportunities, building accountability and how to make project management valued by your management through linking it back to the things executives are worried about.

PMO 180
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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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10 Strategies for Managing Multiple Projects at Once

LiquidPlanner

Hands up if you are managing multiple projects? Yes, I thought so! A while back in my career I had the luxury of managing a big project and that was all I did. I use the term “luxury” lightly because it was hard work, but at least my brain was always in the same space each day. These days, like many of you, I manage multiple projects. Some of them are actually quite big in terms of budget and duration, but not so much in terms of drain on my time each week.

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I don't want to lose what I've got

Musings on Project Management

Don't want to slip backward, take a demotion, less pay, risk your savings? Same answer if there is a prospect of doing a whole lot better if you'll just take a risk.? Prospect theory may be for you! Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky may be a project manager's best friends when it comes to understanding decision making under conditions of risk. .

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User Onboarding: 9 Steps to Perfecting your Onboarding Process

Planio

What happens when a new user signs up for your product? If you’re like most companies, you might send out a few half-hearted emails or give a quick ‘tip tour’ the first time they log in. But other than that, you think the tool speaks for itself. They obviously found you for a reason and should be motivated enough to figure out how to use your product on their own.

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Productivity 2.0: Advantages and Risks of the 6-Hour Workday

Inloox

The 6-hour workday model Imagine it was Monday morning. There is an 8 to 9 hour workday ahead of you. How motivated are you? Are you about to work effectively for 8 hours straight now? Of course not. Nobody can be productive for such a long period of time. The average day at the office usually looks like this: Most employees start by helping themselves to a cup of coffee and chatting with their colleagues.

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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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The Truth About Transformations

Leading Answers

Transformations are flavor of the month. It is no longer enough to launch “initiatives,” “programs” or “projects” to undertake work. Instead, we launch agile transformations, digital transformations and productization transformations. They sound more revolutionary, more dramatic and further reaching. Our organizations will emerge reborn, uniquely positioned to compete in a new world of opportunities and growth.

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PMO Conference 2018: Video Diary

Rebel’s Guide to PM

On 13 June 2018 I went to the PMO Conference in London. It’s one of the few conferences that is specifically focused on PMO practices, process, tools and people. I don’t think of myself as really a PMO person so I wasn’t sure what I would get out of it. I was surprised – in a good way! It was brilliant, very well put together and very interesting.

2018 182
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How to Conduct a Risk Assessment for Your Project

LiquidPlanner

One of the biggest challenges of project management is dealing with risks and opportunities. How do I build a work breakdown structure if I don’t know what’s going to be a problem down the road? How do I build my team if the challenges are unknown? How do I effectively leverage good news? The difference between success and failure can come down to proper management of your risks and opportunities.

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Have courage!

Kiron Bondale

When we think of the characteristics of a good team player, we tend to come up with attributes such as demonstrating selflessness, possessing empathy, or being a good communicator. While these are all critical to creating a high performing team, one trait of effective project managers and team members is the ability to do things which take them outside of their comfort zone.

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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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What is the Project Life Cycle and How to Use It Better?

Workamajig

The project life cycle describes the stages a project goes through as it progresses from start to finish. A well-defined life cycle brings order and structure to the project. This article will demystify the project management life cycle and help you run better projects. Few things in project management are more hotly debated than this: The project life cycle.

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Beginner’s Guide to Kanban for Agile Marketing

Digite

We’re honored to republish this blog post ‘Beginner’s Guide to Kanban for Agile Marketing’ by Andrea Fryrear which was originally published in the Agile Sherpas blog! In this article, Andrea explains the Kanban method in detail starting from its origin to its principles and its application. She also shows you how to design your first Kanban Board, with examples.

Agile 110
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Work and Resource Management: Benefits to Bypass the Competition

Planview

Thus far in this blog series based on the Ventana Research whitepaper, “ Five Ways to Increase Efficiency and Innovate Faster ,” we have defined work and resource management (WRM), reviewed how your organization can overcome possible hurdles, identified how to assess your current capabilities, and looked into some specific advantages of WRM applications.

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A Balanced View of the Competing Demands through the Lens of Evaluation

The IIL Blog

By Dr. Willis H. Thomas, PMP, CPT . In project management, keeping a balanced view of the competing demands (cost, time, scope, quality, risk and resources), requires evaluation to be at the center of the model. Evaluation involves a determination of merit (quality), worth (value) and significance (importance). Placing evaluation at the center helps the project team maintain focus on the potential impacts to the competing demands (AKA competing constraints): Cost = budget, including contingency

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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.