January, 2020

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How to Manage a Project Team: 6 Ways You Didn’t Know Helped

ProProfs Project Management

Imagine you have a diverse set of people in your team, each coming from different backgrounds. They have a different way to work, and their work ethics might differ from what you have set for yourself. . Now, as a project manager, how would you feel about this? There are two ways to deal with such a situation: The Bossy Way Out. You can set your priorities straight and give your team a hard time if they don’t follow your terms to the Z. .

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15 Practical Tips to Improve Project Communication

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Do you want to improve communication on your projects? And yet make it easier to do at the same time? In this article I’ll share 15 tried-and-tested tips for effective project communications. 1. Use a milestone tracker. The milestone tracker I use is a simple Excel spreadsheet. It lists the milestones in one column, organised by project phase.

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The 9-Step Checklist for Kickass Project Kickoffs

Workamajig

Project kickoff is one of the most important stages in the lifecycle of a project. Learn how to excel at this stage in this article. Well begun, they say, is half done. Nowhere is this more applicable than at the start of a project. How you start often sets the tone for how the rest of the project unfolds. Kickoff, thus, is a critical time in the life of a project.

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Red Flags, Blue Lessons

MPUG

Watch for these warning signs, so you don’t end up twisting in the wind! As a project manager (PM) for an international consulting firm, I was once assigned to a very large account that taught online classes through the internet. The company was called the High Intensity Teaching Corporation or HIT. This is the pseudonym used throughout, and for reasons that will soon be obvious, I found it managed to fly into some of the most dangerous red flags that warn of project trouble: a virtual office, a

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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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5 Agile Metrics to Improve Performance and Quality

Project Bliss

This is a guest article from Gilad David Maayan. Agile has been a buzzword for many organizations in the last few years. And while many organizations are “adopting” an agile methodology, many are not fully embracing it. Effective implementation of agile requires a cultural shift. You need to actively work towards continuous improvement. To achieve this level of collaboration you need to be able to measure it.

More Trending

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7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Active Listening Skills for Better Communication

Project Bliss

Communication skills are critical for your career. And great active listening skills can serve you in valuable ways you may not have considered. It seems everyone spends a good chunk of their day with their eyes glued to a cell phone. Even when co-workers, spouses, or – saddest of all – kids are speaking, we’re not really engaged. And often, even when someone is speaking to us about something important, we’re often not really listening, but instead thinking about what we&

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Project Management Trends for Agencies: What to Skip, What to Adopt

Workamajig

What are some of the top project management trends agencies need to watch out for? Find the right answers in this article. As a project manager, you have your work cut out for you. It’s not enough to master the nuances of managing projects in the creative field - a tough ask in itself - you also have to stay abreast of the latest developments in project management.

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Project Leader vs. Project Manager: The 7 Essential Project Leadership Skills

Planio

What’s the difference between a project manager and a project leader? If you’ve ever gone hunting for a definitive answer to this question, you probably ended up disappointed. Depending on your company’s size, policies, and management, these terms might be used interchangeably or they might signify wildly different roles. Leadership is a hot topic in every part of a growing business.

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Project Management Framework Types, Key Elements & Best Practices

ProjectManager.com

A project never exists in a vacuum. A project is executed by a team within an organization that has some sort of a project management framework established to enable the process. This framework, whether deliberately designed or not, acts as a loose guide for how the project should function for teams across multiple channels. This framework should be designed to suit the needs of your projects, your goals and your team.

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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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Project Management Job Description

Rebel’s Guide to PM

The project management job descriptions you see in profiles on LinkedIn might not represent exactly what you would do in the role. That’s because project managers do so many different things! In this article, we’ll look at the things that make up a typical project management job description, and then look at some specialist industries plus the role of a junior project manager.

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How do you handle unresponsive key project stakeholders?

Kiron Bondale

It is a common challenge for anyone who has managed projects for a meaningful amount of time. One or more of your key stakeholders who are integral to the successful completion of the project appears unwilling to engage as expected. It could be the project sponsor who ignores your pleas for assistance with a project issue, the functional manager who turns a blind eye to your requests for staffing support or the executive who never seems to have the time to review and sign off on a key deliverabl

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Design Thinking: Human Centered Design for Innovative Problem-Solving

Project Bliss

What Is Design Thinking? Design Thinking is a human centered approach to innovative problem-solving. Design Thinking seems to be a hot buzzword these days. You’ve likely heard it mentioned in meetings or hallway talk around the office. And you may be thinking that it’s something best left to engineers or the R&D team. But Design Thinking is a valuable problem-solving and design approach that can be used by many different teams.

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My Top 10 Project Risk Management Blog Posts of 2019

Project Risk Coach

Are you a better project manager today than you were a year ago? I hope my blog has boosted your knowledge and application. In case you missed some of my blog posts, I'm sharing my most popular project risk management posts of 2019. So, just how many of you came to the Project Risk Coach website in 2019? Year Visitors 2019 220,856 2018 113,206 2017 57,560 2016 42,000 2015 33,000 One of my 2019 goals was to help 180,000 website visitors.

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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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Systems Thinking in Organizational Coaching

Scrum.org

This is quite a long read which you can download as the whitepaper "Systems Thinking in Organizational Coaching". Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought. —Albert Einstein. Introduction. How many times have you “improved” something in your organization, but the improvements didn’t last long?

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What Is Scrumban? How It Differs from Scrum & Kanban

ProjectManager.com

Project management is an art of solutions. You have a project, and it has a means to complete it within the constraints of time, scope and cost. As rigid as some methodologies can appear, they’re surprisingly cooperative when combined with others to create a workable hybrid. For example, take scrum. Scrum is a great framework for helping teams work more productively together.

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8 Unique Project Management Tips for Tech Teams

LiquidPlanner

Tech teams are comprised of creative individuals, each with their own ideas on how things should work. A good project manager should allow team members to express their creativity, but also keep them focused on the main goal at the same time. The PM is the team member who brings all the creative forces together. Below are the most important project management tips that will make you a more successful manager in the tech industry: 1.

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Handling complexity requires psychological safety

Kiron Bondale

I wrote two weeks back about Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and the benefit of models such as Cynefin and the Theory of Constraints for being able to understand them. What I didn’t focus on in that article was how important the people element is when dealing with CAS. Two HBR articles published this week reminded me of that critical ingredient.

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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 10 Best Task Management Software For Getting More Work Done, Faster

The Digital Project Manager

Having a good task system where you take advantage of task management tools and task. The post The 10 Best Task Management Software For Getting More Work Done, Faster appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

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How to Be a Project Risk Management Evangelist

Project Risk Coach

The Project Management Institute says, "high-performing companies manage risk in conjunction with projects and programs far more often than low performers do." How can you help your company manage risks and become a high performer? Let's look at ways to become a project risk management evangelist. The lack of senior management support is one of the primary barriers to effective organizational risk management.

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How much autonomy should teams get from their agile leader?

Scrum.org

The agile movement really has changed the way we lead our people. Giving them more freedom and autonomy to do their job often improves the quality, productivity ánd happiness of the people. Because knowledge workers (or highly educated people) don't need a boss to tell them what to do, they only need a healthy context or environment in which they can do their job.

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How to Make a Gantt Chart in 5 Steps

ProjectManager.com

Gantt charts have been around for a long time, but since they migrated from analog to digital, their ease of use has made them a staple of project management. There can be misconceptions about Gantt charts, but plainly stated, a Gantt chart shows tasks over time. On the left of a Gantt chart is a list of the tasks, and to the right is a timeline in which those tasks are placed according to when they occur in the project.

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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 to Do When a Project Fails: How to Document and Share Lessons Learned

Planio

Not every project goes as planned. And while it’s great to celebrate your wins, the best teams (and project managers!) know it’s just as important to dig into your failures and capture lessons learned. Unfortunately, when a project fails, the last thing most people want to do is dig into why it did. Failure sucks. But whether it’s pride or future deadlines that cause you to turn a blind eye, ignoring failed projects as a source of future knowledge is a huge mistake.

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Transparency improves customer satisfaction

Kiron Bondale

The link between transparency and trust is well known. You are more likely to trust the quality of the food you are served when eating at a restaurant with an open concept kitchen than if the food preparation is done entirely out of sight. Transparency is a pillar of the Scrum framework and while it is not explicitly spelled out by other frameworks or in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it is indirectly referenced.

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Kanban vs. Scrum: Key Differences & How To Choose

The Digital Project Manager

If you are a team with large projects to manage or looking for ways to. The post Kanban vs. Scrum: Key Differences & How To Choose appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

SCRUM 202
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Enhancing Productivity for Project Managers in the New Year

LiquidPlanner

In the New Year, businesses are eager to dive into new tasks and goals. Project managers are the first in line to have a full understanding of the intentions of the company going forward. It’s their job to take the companies’ new challenges and get them accomplished in the best way to achieve the desired goals in a timely manner. All around the world, work productivity is generally getting lower.

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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.