February, 2018

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The What, Why, and How of Projects

Project Risk Coach

3 Powerful Questions for Fast Tracking Your Projects In this article, let’s look at three simple and powerful questions that project managers should ask in every project, the what, why, and how of projects. Getting answers to these questions will greatly reduce risks to your projects and position you and your teams for success. 3 Key Project Questions. 1.

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How to Create a Project Assumptions List: Examples and Template Included

Project Bliss

. When my daughter was very little she came home from school one day and told me the saying about assumptions: When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. Gasp! “Where did you hear that, honey?” “At school, Mommy. Our teacher told us.” Yes, you’ve heard that one. I just didn’t expect my little one to learn that saying so early in her life.

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Can agile teams be virtual?

Musings on Project Management

Somebody asked: can a virtual team do Agile? 15 years ago, the answer might have been no. Seven years ago, more less pre smart phone and smart-phone networking, the answer was probably yes, but with reservations. Now, the answer is "Of course", with some adjustments. Here are my thoughts on this. The communications channel: Virtual teams often begin by emulating the behavior and.

Agile 191
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How to Be Assertive At Work (Nicely)

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This article, How to Be Assertive At Work (Nicely) , first appeared on Girl's Guide to Project Management. This is a guest article from Andy Kaufman, PMP. Andy Kaufman. I work with project managers around the world, and increasingly there’s one success trait that I find could use a tune-up. In a word, it’s assertiveness. Some of this is unquestionably cultural.

Lean 242
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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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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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The 10 Risk Management Commandments You’re Breaking Every Day

Project Risk Coach

I fear that many project managers live by the letter of the law and may fail to gain the true benefits of risk management. These individuals are too concerned with checking boxes and making the risk management processes overly complex. Let’s look at some common mistakes and how to overcome them. 1. Thou shalt not make risk management complicated. Every project is different.

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3 Critical Reasons to Run Effective Meetings – It’s More Important Than You Think

Project Bliss

Effective meetings don’t just happen. It takes effort. And for that reason, you might be tempted to skip the prep work needed for a great meeting. But don’t do it. It’s easy to simply send out invitations and walk into the conference room at meeting time. But you’d be making a big mistake and missing valuable opportunities. There are three big reasons why running effective meetings is more important than you think… 1.

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Process breakdown structure

Musings on Project Management

A coffee shop discussion on process redesign and process improvement led me to state the obvious to my caffeine-charged debaters: Managers responsible for the business buy results [and outcomes], not process. Process, by itself, does not sell well; what sells is results. Process per se is a tool. For the most part, business people hire experts for their ability to deliver results; what.

Process 150
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Free Organisational Chart Template

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This article, Free Organisational Chart Template , first appeared on Girl's Guide to Project Management. This month’s freebie is an organisational chart template created with PowerPoint’s SmartArt tool and another sample organisational chart created from scratch, also in PowerPoint. I’ve already populated the charts with made up details so you can see how they will look.

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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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Mindfulness for Leaders: Improving Management Practices

LiquidPlanner

Leadership is essential to any successful work environment. Managers are in charge of not only running a productive team, but ensuring that there is a positive environment in which their team can work. Recently, the concept of using mindfulness to create this sort of workplace has gained popularity. While it is easy to write the myriad of articles off simply as a passing trend, there is an increasing amount of data suggesting taking time out of your day to breathe and meditate can have concrete,

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RBS is one more technique for your estimation tool belt!

Kiron Bondale

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. Take a course covering agile delivery and you’ll learn about relative sizing techniques such as estimating poker or t-shirt sizing. But have you heard of RBS?

Estimate 136
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Evaluating Risks Using Quantitative Risk Analysis

Project Risk Coach

Project managers should be prepared to perform different types of risk analysis. For many projects, the quicker qualitative risk analysis is all you need. But there are occasions when you will benefit from a quantitative risk analysis. Let’s take a look at this type of analysis: What is it? Why should we perform it? And when should it be performed? Continue Reading.

Risk 199
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The Yin-Yang of Productivity

Digite

This year’s Nobel for Economics has gone to the Behavioural Economist Richard Thaler. Richard is a Distinguished Professor at the Chicago Booth Business School. His big work is the influence of clues and society on individual decision making and actions. The field of Behavioural economics has fascinated me ever since I read Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller “ Thinking Fast and Slow ”.

Energy 130
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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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C.R.A.C.K. customers

Musings on Project Management

Barry Boehm on the C.R.A.C.K. Customer Dr. Barry Boehm, a noted software methodologist with a long and illustrative career at TRW, DARPA, and USC, and author of the COCOMO model and Sprial methodology, writes about the ideal customer for agile projects. They are: -- Collaborative: they will engage with their customer peers and with the development team -- Representative: they know the.

Agile 150
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What I’m Reading

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This article, What I’m Reading , first appeared on Girl's Guide to Project Management. I have to get new glasses and I’m trying to give my eyes a rest from screen time by reading more on the train. Actually, my optician said that it’s not the screen itself that’s the issue, it’s the distance – having your eyes focused on one distance all the time is hard work for them.

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Scrum Master vs Project Manager vs Product Owner and More

PM Basics

Eh? Scrum Master vs. Project Manager vs. Product Owner? Sound like comparing apples with oranges. However, in real life, project managers lead scrum teams. Scrum Masters do need project management tools and techniques. I’m asked this kind of questions so many times that I decided to create this in-depth article on roles in different project management frameworks.

SCRUM 111
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Have we learned anything?

Kiron Bondale

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. Back in April 2009, I published my very first blog article titled “ Lessons Learned; Avoid the Oxymoron “ Since that time, I’ve gained a broader appreciation of the multiple challenges organizations face when trying to get sustainable, reusable knowledge out of projec

2009 159
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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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Evaluating Project Schedules Utilizing Quantitative Risk Analysis

Project Risk Coach

Do you remember the first time you missed a project deadline? I do. I recall the embarrassment for me and my team. I promised myself I would take proactive steps to mitigate this outcome for future projects. Why do projects take longer than expected? Often times, risks occur and project managers lack adequate schedule reserves. Once burned, many project managers start a bad habit – padding their project schedules.

Risk 150
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Anatomy of a Task

Binfire

No, this article is not about the book called Hamlet, the anatomy of tasks by Ann Louise Hentz or a review of the very popular ABC network’s show called Grey’s Anatomy , but rather it refers to the specific unit of work called a task in project management. Every day we all do all sorts of tasks if we like or not. Our lives are filled with doing this task or another.

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Illuminating the path

Musings on Project Management

Here below I shamelessly reprint a posting from herdingcats. Why? Because Glen's point about the purpose of plans is to illuminate possibilities; not to constrain critical thinking, common sense, and accommodation for changing facts, is profound. Everyone who practices project management or team management should understand that. From herding cats: In the space of two days I had evolved.

Planning 150
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Celebrating Project Success: 5 Things You Can Do

LiquidPlanner

One of the by-products of being an engineer, a project manager, and having served over two decades in the military is that I tend to focus on what’s going wrong, or could go wrong, on a project instead of acknowledging project success. While this is a great mind-set for solving problems and performing risk management, in the realm of managing people it falls short.

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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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Extending Portfolio Kanban with Enterprise Services Planning

Digite

Transformation approach using the enterprise services view, balancing system demand with capability, planning and prioritization using a visual decision framework, using decision support analytics like probabilistic forecasting and cost of delay. This post extends further on the possibilities of Portfolio Kanban for Enterprise Transformation , building on your reading of the previous posts in this series.

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5 Things to do Before You Start a Project

Redbooth

“Our first game is called Well Begun Is Half Done,” Mary Poppins tells the Banks children. “Otherwise titled, Let’s Tidy Up the Nursery.”. In a project, planning sets you up for success, even if you think the process might slow you down. On the other hand, you might think that more planning results in better outcomes, but it can lead to analysis paralysis instead.

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AlchemyWorks: Software Review [2018]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This article, AlchemyWorks: Software Review [2018] , first appeared on Girl's Guide to Project Management. General information. Name: AlchemyWorks. Vendor: AlchemyWorks Ltd. Hosting options: Web only. There’s also an android app available. Languages: English comes as standard and you can add terminology in your own language. However, system prompts and contextual help are only available in English.

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Wrike Alternatives

Binfire

Wrike is a popular project management application used by many and in different market segments. It has a nice feature set which is more than just task management.This article is about Wrike and Wrike alternatives. Like all things in life, one size does not fit all and one application does not fit every project’s needs. Although Wrike might be well suited for some projects, it lacks features, ease of use or structure to support other projects.

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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.