Sat.May 30, 2020 - Fri.Jun 05, 2020

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How has project management changed?

Rebel’s Guide to PM

We aren’t managing projects now in the same way that people managed projects years ago. The approaches taken by many companies and professional bodies to managing projects are different now to when I first started out in the field in 2000ish. So why has that happened and what have been the biggest shifts in how project management has evolved? There are a number of things that to focus on, even just comparing my own experiences from when I started managing projects over 10 years ago to the

2008 357
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When the Team Says, ?We Don?t Need to Plan.?

Leading Agile

When a team does not keep rigor, discipline, and quality in making the work-ready, it doesn’t just impact that team – it impacts all the dependent teams and ultimately the return on investment. *The team names have been changed to protect the learning, but the learning needs to be shared. The mobile team is a nimble team. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re running with full continuous deployment and the latest technology, so they get to brag – they are Agile, right?

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Three more team building lessons from gardening

Kiron Bondale

A few years back, I wrote an article in which I provided some gardening tips to developing good teams. I’m spending more time tending my garden these days so I decided to share a few more lessons for those wishing to cultivate a team building “green thumb” Fertilization should be regular, but situational. Grass lawns need to be fertilized at regular intervals but the composition of the fertilizer (the proportions of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) varies by season and by th

Energy 246
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4 Must-Have Features for a Kanban Tool

ProjectManager.com

There are many kanban tools on the market today, and they all have different feature sets. There are simple drag-and-drop tools for organizing to-do lists, planning systems for agile teams and hybrid tools for robust project management. After reviewing dozens of these tools, we’ve found that there are four specific features of a kanban tool that are must-haves for any serious user.

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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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How to Plan to Leave Your Job

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Have you ever thought about how to prepare to leave your job gracefully? What should you do before quitting your job? I’ve got all the answers for you! I’ve always tried to keep half an eye on the door. Even if you’ve got a great position right now, it might not be a great position in six months. All kinds of things can change: you get a new manager , someone you don’t like as much.

Planning 323

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PMO Leadership: How PMOs Can Evolve into Savvy PMOs

Planview

PMO leadership today is about more than being a purveyor of governance and delivering projects on time and on budget. The Savvy PMO fosters organizational agility, cultivates efficiencies, and drives growth strategies. They meet executive expectations for informed counsel on vital business decisions such as which projects to prioritize, where to focus spending, how to align and realign the workforce in response to change, and much more.

PMO 142
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Natural stupidity

Musings on Project Management

"We study natural stupidity rather than artificial intelligence" Amos Tversky Tversky--now deceased--was a partner with Daniel Kahneman, who together wrote some of the most influential papers about biases in our observations and the biases that affect decision making under uncertainty. If you're a project manager or business manager, then you encounter these influences routinely.

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If the Shu fits?

Growing Agile

Blogging doesn’t come naturally for me, I find it hard to find topics to write about that I think other people will find interesting. Why would anyone read something I wrote? Imposter Syndrome hits us all in different ways I guess. So I am following the advice of a dear friend who said ‘just do it’…. Now you may have stopped reading already, but for those that haven’t, I’d like to take you on a journey of Shu-Ha-Ri.

Agile 191
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Scrum Master – why your Scrum doesn’t work (3/3)

Scrum.org

Many teams and organizations struggle to get the most out of Scrum. In a previous post “Don’t blame “agile” for existing problems” I shared my analysis why agile or Scrum itself often gets the blame. In this third post out of three I will focus on what the most common mistakes are with Scrum that lead to dysfunctional Scrum. But this time we take the perspective of the Scrum Master.

SCRUM 167
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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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Reset, Refocus: 2 Concepts and 8 Tips for Making Progress During the Pandemic

Leading Answers

It is a dilemma. We need to move forward. Not just to make progress on projects, but also to give people something else to focus on beyond the tragedy and fear filling the news. At the same time, we need to be sensitive to how people have been impacted. We need to demonstrate support and empathy. We need to be available to listen and help wherever we can.

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Risk management: hierarchy v. mesh

Musings on Project Management

Almost anyone who's been around projects for a few years has experienced hierarchy: it's like a pyramid, with one person at the apex and a number of layers spreading out below, interconnected, for the most part, top-down. On the other hand, another structure is like a mesh, wired for the most part peer-to-peer, and mostly flat -- few hierarchical titles and few top-down controls, and lots of.

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Effectively Using Excel for Analyzing MS Project Data

MPUG

MS Project (MSP) is an excellent tool for preparing and tracking project schedules. Excel is also a great tool for analyzing any type of data. So, which one should you use for schedule analysis? You probably know that MSP has a whole host of features for analyzing project schedules like Task Filters, Sorting, and Reports. It also provides different views like Resource Usage View and Tracking Gantt View for analyzing different aspects of a project schedule.

2010 111
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The Art of Listening - The first skill of a Scrum Master

Scrum.org

I was once told that we have one mouth and two ears and that we should use them in those proportions. Now, those who know me will know that I struggle with that. Over the past few months I've been spending time exploring professional coaching via Co-Active coaching. One of the things a Scrum Master should be doing, is to practice, improve and refine the coaching skills.

SCRUM 239
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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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Top Tools To Effectively Manage All Your Social Networks Under One Roof

Proofhub

8 Tools To Effectively Manage All Your Social Networks Under One Roof It’s a crazy time, isn’t it? More people are active on social media compared to the previous year with more than 4.5 billion people using the internet at this time. That means more audience to target for your brand! The worldwide use of social media is growing with Facebook being the most popular social media platform.

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What Makes Organisations Fail to Execute Their Strategy?

Strategy Execution | PMO Perspectives

I recently asked an executive where their organisation would be in 2 years’ time. After some tapping on their laptop, they proudly showed me their new corporate webpages, proclaiming their ‘strategy’, ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ statements. [1] So far so good – we’re halfway there. All we need to do now is execute that strategy! Presumably, it will just happen now that senior management have expressed the strategic direction?

Executing 107
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How to Maintain a Positive Attitude About Work (When the World Feels Like it’s Falling Apart)

MPUG

Are you feeling a sense of exhaustion, low-grade anxiety, and burnout? You’re not alone. We’re living through tough times right now with the coronavirus pandemic—our lives and work projects have been upended, and it takes everything we’ve got to keep things afloat. Keeping a positive attitude with all of the challenges and uncertainties can be difficult.

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Remote Agile (9): A Cheat Sheet for Remote Agile Event Planning

Scrum.org

TL; DR: Remote Agile Event Planning — a Cheat Sheet. Imagine, you are supposed to facilitate a remote user-story mapping with 26 people from all over our organization. Or, think about a remote meta-level Retrospective of a recent release of your organization’s cash cow that went sideways. You may ask yourself: How am I planning for this given that participants likely have different levels of experience, and everyone needs to be included fully in the discussion?

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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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How to Become a Project Manager and Succeed in the Business World

ProProfs Project Management

A skilled and diligent project manager is the crucial component to making business projects successful. It could be the primary reason why businesses take the hiring process so seriously and set a high salary bar for job candidates coming for the role of a project manager. . As per the industry reports, companies have to fill 2.2 million new project-oriented roles every year, starting from 2027.

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The Complete Guide to Project Milestones: Definition, Purpose, Identification & Tracking Progress

Teamweek

But what exactly are project milestones? How are they different from deliverables or a bunch of tasks? What are the best practices for identifying project milestones? In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about milestones. What is a project milestone? How are milestones different from deliverables and tasks? Reasons why milestones are critical to project planning.

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Teaching OKRs to Executives w/ Andrew Young

Leading Agile

Listen to the SoundNotes Podcast on the go! Find and subscribe to SoundNotes on: Apple Podcasts. Google Play. Spotify. Soundcloud. RSS. This week in LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, we’re focusing on Objectives and Key Results. Andrew Young joins Dave to talk about this history of OKRs, why they have become such an important part of how we track and measure performance, why they matter to Executives, and why teaching Executives about OKRs requires a very specific approach.

Executing 136
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Open Space

Scrum.org

Open Space is one of the 33 Liberating Structures listed in the Book "The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures " (2014), but because Open Space has been around for quite some time, the power of Open Space did not come as a surprise for many. . Being thrown into the same bag with some straight-forward liberating structures (e.g. 1,2,4,all) is a pro and con for Open Space.

2012 135
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Acclaim Projects Helps Deliver Innovation Projects on Time and on Budget

This large intercity transportation company for people and freight employs 100+ IT employees and contractors across North America and Europe and spends $10MM annually for approximately 50 inflight projects. The company needed the right financial tools to budget for innovation initiatives and real-time information on spending and forecasting. This transportation company turned to Acclaim Projects by Sopheon to help deliver projects on time and within budget.

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Making Your Project Management Tool Super-Productive with Human Resource Management System Integration

Epicflow Blog

There’s hardly any area of business where people aren’t involved. If you run a company, human resource management is one of the paramount directions of your activities. People have their own affairs, fall ill, take sick leaves, days off, and long vacations. And it’s a natural workflow, you can’t and don’t have to change anything. The only thing you should do is to make sure your projects don’t suffer because of these abscences.

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Want to Overcome Chronic Procrastination? It’s All About Emotion Regulation

Teamweek

Illustration: Jo Zixuan Zhou. You start your morning like you do every other day: with your to-do list. You jot down everything rattling around in your brain and realize that you have a lot to accomplish in a few hours. Time to buckle down, right? But first you grab yourself a cup of coffee and a pastry. After that, you post some recent dog photos to your team’s instant messaging channel before scrolling through social media.

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Evidence-Based Management card deck

Henny Portman

In January 2019 I published a blog about Evidence-Based Management. When I spoke at the Agile Tour 2019 in Vilnius, Lithuania, I met, among others, Magdalena Firlit as one of the other speakers. She mentioned a card deck she developed to support her classes regarding Evidence-Based Management. I just received some copies of that deck (really appreciated).

2019 82
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It's all about your Fitness

Scrum.org

. In our professional world of software development, it is very common someone asking “What is this Agile?” And I have heard people debating on the definition of Agile using heavy weight words like it’s a mindset, it’s a culture, way of leadership, methodology, manifesto, group of practices etc. Nothing wrong with these definitions, they are all good but a bit difficult to explain to someone who is new to this concept.

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From Concepts to Actionable Insights: Powering Digital Transformation Success

Speaker: Ketan Jahagirdar - Sopheon’s Director of Product Management

70% of most digital transformation projects fail. Learn how you can quickly improve that success rate. To be successful, digital transformation involves the strategic application of digitalization to improve a business’ entire system of production, procurement, sales, operations, human resources, and financial management. In short, to basically transform the way a company makes money and delivers value to customers.