November, 2016

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The 5 Skills You Need For Managing Complex Projects

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Sometimes projects can seem a bit overwhelming. I know – I’ve cried with frustration after a meeting where totally the wrong people put together an unachievable plan. Complexity adds to the overwhelm. Not only are you feeling that the project is like a cat you can’t get in the carry case to take the vet, but there are a ton of other complicating factors.

2016 340
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The What, Why, and How of Project Requirements

Project Risk Coach

Learn technical skills to accelerate your projects through requirements development How big of a deal are project requirements? The Project Management Institute says, “47% of unsuccessful projects fail to meet goals due to poor requirements management.” In his book — Just Enough Requirements Management — Alan Davis shares, “Various studies suggest that errors introduced during requirements activities account for 40 to 50 percent of all defects found in a software pr

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When Projects turn to a Tower of Babel

The Lazy Project Manager

Different countries, multiple languages, global organizations…The challenge of international projects. In this day and age, international teams and projects affect most companies; and they can often be a source of headaches for project managers. They must be managed from different countries and in multiple languages. Needless to say, international projects prove to be strategic for companies that wish to remain competitive.

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5 secrets to creating the best project management resume

Moira Alexander

Your resume is an extension of you professionally, and to some extent personally, and because you only have one chance to create that best first impression on paper, make sure it counts in a big way. Before you actually get an interview, an employer has to value your resume enough to want to pick up the phone. Here are a few secrets to the making of an eye-catching project management resume that will get employers calling. 1: First pass the visual test.

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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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What determines when project planning is just right?

Kiron Bondale

I’d written previously about some similarities between baking and project management , but a key difference between the two is that even a novice baker can procure the right ingredients, follow a plan step-by-step and still manage to achieve a reasonably tasty outcome. Unfortunately with projects, there is no set recipe. That is the Achilles Heel of many project management development programs – they can do a wonderful job of teaching you how to correctly execute certain practices bu

Planning 196

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Inspiring Women in Project Management: Erica Pepitone

Rebel’s Guide to PM

In the Inspiring Women in Project Management series, I normally interview people who have had a relatively long career already. But you don’t have to be hugely experienced to inspire others. Today I’m interviewing Erica Pepitone, PMP, a first year project manager living, working, and learning in New York City. She’s recently moved from a coordinator job to a project management job – a leap that I know lots of people wonder about making.

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13 Resource Management Software & Resource Scheduling Tools

The Digital Project Manager

Resource management is a tough gig. Wrangling your agency’s management team, primadonna’s, and resources into some kind of order without resource management software is hard. The post 13 Resource Management Software & Resource Scheduling Tools appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

Software 282
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How to Identify Scope Risks

Project Risk Coach

8 ways to identify scope risks Some project managers struggle to identify scope risks. Why? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock. First, individuals may lack a concrete understanding of scope; scope seems to be a nebulous concept. WHAT exactly is scope? Second, individuals may not know HOW to identify scope risks. Either way, the failure to identify (and manage) scope risks can be costly.

Risk 235
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Agile in the critical systems space

Musings on Project Management

I read a recent posting about agile from a very odd corner of the PM space for an agile conversation to be: CriticalUncertainties, a (conservative) blog about critical safety and failure (or fail safe) requirements in complex systems.

Agile 174
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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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What should a good project management training simulation include?

Kiron Bondale

Project management is a profession where the most common response to a scenario question is “it depends” This stems from the basic definition of a project – it is a unique endeavor and hence a good practice for one project may be the wrong practice on another. While this can be frustrating for those asking the questions, it also makes it challenging to develop effective training programs for new project managers.

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Puppy Love

The Lazy Project Manager

It is OK, you can relax – I am not launching in to a version of the (in)famous Donnie Osmond song, but the house has a new puppy. Well to be brutally honest, after only 7 days, it is really that the puppy has a new house since pretty much everything revolves around this 4 lb bundle of chaotic energy and general cuteness. Even I, who didn’t want a dog – we have cats; cats are easy, arrogant and aloof but they show you just enough love to make sure you keep feeding them and keep the central heatin

PMO 158
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Stakeholder-led Project Management [Book Review]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

“I am convinced that stakeholders must always impact upon the way we manage our projects,” writes Louise M. Worsley in Stakeholder-led Project Management: Changing the Way We Manage Projects. “I hope I can convince you.”. I’m probably the ideal audience for this book: I don’t need convincing. I wrote a book about stakeholder engagement too. She goes on: Stakeholder management is not a series of steps to be gone through, but a perspective that when fathomed and its implications understood, always

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Tool Review: Workbook a full featured agile agency project management toolkit

The Digital Project Manager

WorkBook is a powerful agency specialist project management software tool that’s designed to power an entire agency’s process. It’s a fully featured project management software suite. The post Tool Review: Workbook a full featured agile agency project management toolkit appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

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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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New Exciting Chapter in My Life

Project Risk Coach

What’s your life calling? Frederich Buechner wrote that calling is “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” My greatest joy is teaching. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock. I got it honest, as we’d say in the South. My father taught farmers how to farm and my mother taught students high school chemistry.

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5 levels of Agile planning. and the DoD

Musings on Project Management

Some years ago I picked up this nice summary image of agile planning over several time cycles. It came from a white paper at AgileConnection.com " entitled "Scaling Agile Processes: Five Levels of Planning Fortunately, to give some credibility to his thesis, the author says right up front that agile methods don't scale to enterprise level without some changes!

Agile 250
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Risk responses which PMI never taught you!

Kiron Bondale

We’ve all learned the standard risk responses to threats (accept, avoid, mitigate or transfer) and opportunities (accept, exploit, enhance or share) from the Guide to the PMBOK, and Dr. David Hillson recently wrote about a ninth possible response of risk escalation. But these nine only represent a recommended set and hence aren’t inclusive of what we see practiced on projects every day.

Risk 150
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The Social Project Manager

The Lazy Project Manager

The Social Project Manager. Balancing Collaboration with Centralised Control in a Project Driven World. We human beings are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

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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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Online Training: BrainBOK Review

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This article contains affiliate links. BrainBOK: Project Management Training Online. Name: BrainBOK. Hosting options: Online only. Cost and plans: There’s a free version to allow you to test out a limited number of features. The PMP® pack including all the practice exams and the important proof of your 35 contact hours for your PMP® application is $99.99.

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How a project manager can smooth interdepartmental conflict

Moira Alexander

The causes of interdepartmental conflict are numerous, but how much can a PM do to resolve the issues? Let's take a look at some of the more common conflicts today's project managers might be forced to deal with and what, if any, actions they can take to improve the situation. Leadership conflict that trickles down. If interdepartmental conflict is rooted at the top of an organization, it's virtually impossible for a project manager to help undo this.

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How to Attack the Enemies of Scope Management

Project Risk Coach

Why is scope management so difficult? What enemies cause us scope issues? Let’s first consider the essence of scope management: “to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required, to complete the project successfully,” according to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Let’s take a look at each part of this statement.

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Understanding project statistics

Musings on Project Management

Chapter 14 from the GAO Cost Estimating Manual on "Cost Risk and Uncertainty" is a good read, easily understood, and very practical in its examples. Here's one illustration that I particularly like. When you look at it, it's understood in a moment that the repeated random throw of two dice generates a probability density function [PDF] that has a bell-shape curve.

Estimate 220
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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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Project Management in Manufacturing: Solving the Resource Management Issue

LiquidPlanner

If you work in manufacturing, you’re likely familiar with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Materials Resource Planning (MRP)—the system used to manage product planning, inventory management, production, fulfillment, and other aspects of production management and control. What’s more, you probably have a decent appreciation of how ERP/MRP systems have enabled manufacturing companies to optimize core business processes.

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10 Time Tracking Software Tools

The Digital Project Manager

Time tracking software is painful. Not only for those of us doing timesheets but also as project managers, trying to manage project budgets and getting. The post 10 Time Tracking Software Tools appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

Software 153
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The Battle Between Process and Progress

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This is a contribution by Chris Hammond from smartitpm.com. Chris Hammond. As Project Managers, we’re all familiar with process. In fact, sometimes it can feel as if a project manager’s world is but a never-ending universe of interlocking processes and procedures. But what happens when the need to follow organisational process inevitably conflicts with making project progress?

Process 257
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How project management software can save you

Binfire

When we think about the benefits of desktop project management software, efficiency and speed to market come to mind. Project management software visualizes plans and timelines that can be referenced by the entire team. Commitments are made and formalized. With project management software, deliverables can be completed on-time and within budget.

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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.