June, 2022

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Calming Project Management Anxiety

LiquidPlanner

Remember that hit from the ’80s, “Who Can It Be Now”? The vocalist seems racked with paranoia, wondering who could be knocking on his door. “Is it the man come to take me away?” And later in the song, “go away, don’t come around here no more.” These feelings are sometimes our reality in the project management world. We dread that next call from our customer, the project management office leader, or a company executive looking for answers or updates on our latest project.

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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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Program Manager vs. Project Manager: What’s the Difference?

ProjectManager.com

Project manager vs. program manager. The two roles often differ in their day-to-day tasks and the overarching approach to their role. Program managers are more strategic in their thinking and deliverables, while the project manager is often working on day-to-day task management on a more cellular level. But before we compare the roles of a program manager and a project manager in-depth, we must first understand the difference between a project and a program.

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How to Manage Project Uncertainty Better

Project Risk Coach

Do you want to be the Sherlock Holmes of project management? Let’s look at three ways to manage project uncertainty better. We find these aspects of uncertainty in the PMBOK® Guide, Seventh Edition – ambiguity, complexity, and volatility. Project managers walk into the unknown with each new project. You may be unsure about numerous factors including but not limited to: User requirements Team dynamics External events such as natural disasters or new political policies Changes in market conditions

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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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Remote Work and Scrum

Scrum.org

I am sure everyone has seen Elon Musk’s email to his team at Tesla telling them they needed to get back in the office. Elon has joined other high-profile companies such as Netflix and Goldman Sachs making work in the office mandatory. For many of these organizations, they cite the reason for moving back into the office as improved collaboration or in the case of Tesla, to be fair to the factory workers who need to physically be in the office.

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3 Ways Project Management Software Helps With Resource Planning

LiquidPlanner

Resource planning is a discipline within project management software that ensures the most effective use of an organization’s team members and resources across the portfolio. This involves gathering the proper mix and quantity of resources required to complete a project and coordinating timelines between different departments using the same resources.

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Otter Review (2022)

Rebel’s Guide to PM

When I asked over 200 project managers what task they would most like to drop, meetings were near the top of the list (just after project documentation). So what would life look like if it was easier to have meetings and take notes afterward? That’s what I use Otter for. Let me tell you why it’s so great. What is Otter? Otter.ai is an artificial intelligence tool for productive, collaborative meetings.

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Software Development Estimation: A Quick Guide

ProjectManager.com

Software development estimation is an essential part of many projects. Even before the planning stage , it’s critical to create an accurate forecast of the project’s duration, costs and more. Despite its importance, software development estimation is often overlooked. Maybe that’s because it’s difficult to estimate properly. Software development estimation requires an understanding of all parts of your software development project and the time needed to successfully complete the work to me

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PMBOK® Seventh Edition Principles and Risk Management

Project Risk Coach

The Project Management Institute (PMI) released the PMBOK® Guide, Seventh Edition in July 2021. This edition is a principles-based guide as opposed to the process-based guide of the Sixth Edition. In this article, let's look at each principle and why each one matters with respect to managing risks. Table Of Contents. What are Principles? 1. Be a Diligent, Respectful, and Caring Steward 2.

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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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Meaning of purpose

Scrum.org

In recent years, the Scrum Guide 2020 mentioned that the Product Backlog need s to be committed to the Product Goal, the Sprint Backlog needs to be committed to the Sprint Goal and become an integral part of the Scrum framework. The Scrum teams have started to take this more seriously and apply it in building their Products. But somewhere, there are a lot of Scrum teams trying to apply but still having difficulties and struggling not to know how to build a good goal and help the product succeed.

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8 Factors That Greatly Influence Employee Retention

Proofhub

Image Source It’s already challenging to hire top employees, but keeping them is even more complicated. Just think about the expenses you will save when you don’t have to spend on frequently advertising job postings and recruitment agencies. Not to mention the money, time, and effort you will need to spend on screening, interviewing, hiring, and training new employees.

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Time Management Techniques to Prevent Burnout

LiquidPlanner

It’s ingrained in many of us to strive for optimal productivity. Are you in the habit of negative self-talk when you don’t accomplish as much as you had planned? You are not alone. Many of us may not have a healthy relationship with time management. Have you ever thought to yourself: I never have enough time in a day. I don’t manage my time well enough.

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5 Strategies to Improve Team Productivity on Projects

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Wouldn’t life be better if your team were, well, just a little bit more productive? If there was less chat and more doing? It is possible to create an environment where project team members can be more productive, by creating good habits. You’ve read all the articles, you’ve got ideas about how things could be better. But no one is telling you HOW to get your team to adopt new ways of working.

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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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Change Control Board: Roles, Responsibilities & Processes

ProjectManager.com

It’s a given that there will be changes to the project plan during the project execution phase. It’s impossible to factor in everything — from weather to supply chains to change requests — something is going to conspire against your schedule and budget. This is why projects have a change control board. Project management is methodical, but change is not.

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Who makes the rules for your team?

Kiron Bondale

Playing a board game without all participants having a consistent understanding of the rules is a frustrating, time-wasting experience. The same is true when a team starts to work together for the first time. Whether it is done proactively when the team assembles or is done as a reaction to unhealthy conflicts, having a basic set of working agreements can help to accelerate a team’s transition out of the storming and norming phases of development.

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Scrum Master Interview Questions: The Sprint Review

Scrum.org

TL; DR: Scrum Master Interview Questions on the Sprint Review. Scrum has repeatedly proven to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world , a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient.

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How to Manage Underperforming Employees?

Proofhub

How to Manage Underperforming Employees One of the most critical new managers’ challenges is faced when trying to manage employees. Out of which, the even more crucial aspect of the challenge is managing underperforming employees. Managers have to manage their teams and help them grow while keeping them motivated and engaged. To do this, managers need to know how to identify potential problems in their team and address those problems effectively.

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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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Why You Need To Be Part of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution

LiquidPlanner

Why Join the Digital Dance? Dancing with the Stars [1] , or in the UK Strictly Come Dancing as the original is named, pairs celebrities with professional dancers. Each week the couples perform predetermined dances and compete for judges’ points and audience votes. Weekly, the pairings become a closer and more harmonic partnership (mostly) and, by the end of the season, we see some truly amazing dances in the finale.

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Top 10 Must-Read Books on Collaboration on Projects

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I’ve put together my top list of the best books on collaboration, with a few communication skills books thrown in too. These are the books that I turn to time and time again. They are perfect for anyone working in a project environment, but if you are managing teams of any kind you’ll find something useful in here. I’ve met managers who think that project teams communicate and collaborate by default.

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Records Management: A Quick Guide

ProjectManager.com

Whether you’re managing a traditional, agile or hybrid project, they all have one thing in common: documentation. Depending on the methodology, project management requires a lot of paperwork, which is why records management is so important. Records management helps control your current project and set the stage for future projects. Let’s define what records management is, explore what is the role of a records manager and outline the life cycle of records management.

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The Common Pitfalls on an Agile Journey and How to Avoid Them

Leading Agile

Many large-scale Agile Transformations are struggling. Some have failed. Others can’t figure out why things aren’t working after multiple attempts. It’s easy to blame the people, the process, and the culture. It’s especially easy to blame management. However, the underlying problem is that most large organizations weren’t built to be Agile. Organizational Barriers to Agile.

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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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Don't Learn Scrum from Jira

Scrum.org

. Robb: So last week we put out something about, “Don't learn Scrum from a tool”, and I'd love to clarify a little bit more what we mean by that. So, Greg, have you ever used Jira? Greg: Yeah, I have used Jira. Robb: Fantastic tool. Isn’t it? Greg: Complicated, but potentially fantastic tool. Yeah. Robb: It is, and you know one thing I noticed in there is they have epics and they have user stories, but what's weird is that's not in Scrum.

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5 Main Challenges of Hybrid Working and How to Tackle Them

Proofhub

5 Challenges of Hybrid and How You Can Overcome Them Image Source: Pexels New working models like hybrid working present new opportunities for employees. However, the hybrid workforce model also comes with various challenges along with its benefits. In a hybrid working environment where teams work half-onsite and half-remotely, you need to come up with new best practices to manage teams effectively.

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10 Tips to Lead Successful Remote Retrospectives

nTask

Let’s face the reality, all the agile methodologies weren’t exactly created with distributed teams in mind. All the early agile teams were overwhelmingly co-located in offices, mainly because chat, video conferencing, and other technology that makes the remote work possible were highly laughable and ancient at that time. Ever since the pandemic, so many […].

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The challenges of IT Project Management, with Dave Gordon

Rebel’s Guide to PM

In 2012, I went to Las Vegas for the Pink Elephant ITSM conference. I took some time out of the conference to meet Dave Gordon, author and the project management expert behind The Practicing IT Project Manager website, which has sadly since been taken offline as I believe Dave has now retired. We discussed IT project management, the challenges for project managers working on Software as a Service projects and the cartoon laws of physics.

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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.