The Lazy Project Manager
JULY 8, 2016
Critical to any projects success is having a good project manager we all know but after that then it is pretty important to have a good project sponsor, in fact it can be argued that the project sponsor is the more critical role; but, like the saying goes, ‘you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives’ and the same is true of project sponsors.
Project Risk Coach
JULY 4, 2016
How do you know when to respond to sneaky risks? Sometimes it’s obvious; other times you may experience a slow death march into ultimate ruin. Photo courtesy of AdobeStock.com. Part of our problem is unknown risks; these risks silently steal and kill over time. Even if we are aware of certain risks, we may be unsure of when to respond. Allow me to share a personal story to illustrate.
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Rebel’s Guide to PM
JULY 20, 2016
Regular readers will know that I’m not an expert in Agile, by any means. So I’m delighted to bring you this guest contribution by Elisa Cepale who lives and breathes this stuff in her day job. Elisa, over to you…. Elisa Cepale. I facilitate daily standup meetings for our support team. When I started working for White October we followed the conventional “scrum” format, where the team get together, share what’s new, what’s challenging and what’s happening, and everyone gives feedback
Musings on Project Management
JULY 22, 2016
And when your strategy depends on someone else doing something that's pretty weak strategy Jeff Roe. Politcal strategist Well, yes, but no. Certainly, self-sufficiency is the better game plan, but who gets to play in that green field? Certainly not PMs which are at the behest of sponsors, customers, and other business interests. If they don't behave and get on the same page with the.
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Kiron Bondale
JULY 24, 2016
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
Project Management Update brings together the best content for project management professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Lazy Project Manager
JULY 3, 2016
A guest post by my friends at Genius Project. The phenomenon of the sharing economy can be attributed to the likes of some popular names such as Uber and Airbnb. The magazine Alternatives Economiques, defines it as people creating value together. This form of economy is actually developing itself in the context of social media and internet platforms.
Project Risk Coach
JULY 25, 2016
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.
Rebel’s Guide to PM
JULY 11, 2016
In case the hot topic of Southern rail strikes hasn’t made your local news, the train services here recently have been just awful. Official strikes, high levels of “sickness” (excuse me for being skeptical), accusations of management blocking overtime thus causing delays and cancellations on purpose… I don’t know what to believe. And throw in some freak storms and flooded tracks, plus trespassers and police shutting down the tracks… We’ve had total commuter chaos.
Musings on Project Management
JULY 2, 2016
Every other posting about software these days is about 'go fast' or 'quick delivery' etc. Agile everywhere; Agile every time! But, there's a case for SLOW! How about when you're asked to code up some morality; when you're asked to code the decisions which are philosophical, steeped in moral decisions, and perhaps are quite personal? This project issue is embedded in this essay about coding.
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
Kiron Bondale
JULY 3, 2016
It’s unfortunately an all too familiar scenario. You are assigned to manage a project and before you or your team have had an opportunity to start to chip away at the looming mountain of uncertainty, you get put on the spot to provide a cost or schedule estimate by your project sponsor or some other stakeholder. To make matters worse, your company’s project delivery methodology might insist that an estimate gets provided before work has even commenced.
LiquidPlanner
JULY 21, 2016
It’s been a busy summer here at LiquidPlanner headquarters! Just a couple of weeks ago, we released some product updates that we’re pretty excited about. We made big improvements to workload visualization and forecasting, and added a new way to find and run reports from the main projects view. One report, in particular, got a major upgrade — it’s called the Project Workload report and it’s been the star of the show because it provides a simple and effective way to manage your project team
Ron Rosenhead
JULY 7, 2016
I said that this was an interesting topic and suggested they may want to start refining the ways they worked by looking at project management. ‘How do you mean’, asked my client? Well, let’s look at the projects completed in the last 12 – 24 months: which ones really delivered against the business case, the objectives and benefits? which ones did not?
Project Risk Coach
JULY 19, 2016
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.
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Rebel’s Guide to PM
JULY 27, 2016
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.
Musings on Project Management
JULY 31, 2016
From General Mike Hayden's memoir (paraphrasing from pg 428) Imagine two doors to the same room: One labeled risk manager; the other labeled visionary. Though the risk manager's door, entry is for the inductive thinker: I've got the facts; now I need to connect the dots to reveal a generality or integrating narrative Through the visionary's door, entry is for the deductive thinker: I've.
Kiron Bondale
JULY 10, 2016
Retrospectives are a common, regularly practiced ceremony on projects managed using an agile delivery method. But why stop there? There’s no reason that retrospectives couldn’t be applied to traditional projects too, it’s just that some improvement ideas might not be immediately applicable in a non-iterative lifecycle. But won’t it cost a lot more effort to conduct regular retrospectives rather than waiting till we get to the end of our projects?
Agile Coach
JULY 15, 2016
I worked at an organization years ago that was almost put under by a postal strike. Let’s say at the time, cash flow was a problem. The owner had to put in a substantial chunk of his own savings to make payroll, all because of a 3-ish week strike. Let’s say the owner had a little more to worry about than ‘ being Agile ‘ I remember when the Agile Alliance did their first executive forum at the big annual Agile 20XX conference.
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LiquidPlanner
JULY 6, 2016
Modern project management was born around the time of World War II. Germany built the first interstate highway system, the Reichsautobahnen , in the 1930s, and the United States began The Manhattan Project approximately a decade later to create the first man-made nuclear weapon. These massive projects required planning on a staggering scale, and the people who undertook them needed new tools and techniques in order to carry them to completion.
Project Risk Coach
JULY 18, 2016
I learned a lot about how to keep stakeholders happy from my father. In the Deep South, he taught me, “If Mama ain’t happy, nobody is happy!” Daddy had a simple formula for a healthy home with a wife and four children. He found out what made Mama happy and he made sure she had it. Mama valued faith, hope, and love…lots of love.
Rebel’s Guide to PM
JULY 25, 2016
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.
Musings on Project Management
JULY 28, 2016
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.
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The Digital Project Manager
JULY 23, 2016
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.
Zen Project Management
JULY 29, 2016
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).
LiquidPlanner
JULY 25, 2016
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
Project Risk Coach
JULY 27, 2016
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.
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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