Sat.Aug 18, 2018 - Fri.Aug 24, 2018

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How to Create SMART Goals

ProjectManager.com

SMART is an mnemonic acronym that establishes criteria for ideal goals and objectives in a project. Goals and objectives should always be “SMART,” which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-related. This set of criteria helps managers both recognize their goals and create a structural guide to achieve them. SMART first appeared in a 1981 issue of the magazine Management Review , in a paper by Gorge T.

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12 Questions for Monitoring Project Risks

Project Risk Coach

Some project managers start their projects with a strong focus on risk management. However, somewhere along the way, they lose steam. They spend more time dealing with issues and implementing workarounds. In this article, I am providing questions that can help you in monitoring project risks and as a result, achieve better results. Other project managers start out strong and stick with their risk management.

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Project Management Best Practices for Innovation and Co-Creation

ProjectManager.com

Everyone in business is talking about innovation, but how does one actually innovate? Jennifer Bridges, PMP, shows you practical steps you can take to innovate by using co-creation and project management techniques. Here’s a screenshot of the whiteboard for your reference. In Review – Project Management Best Practices for Innovation and Co-Creation.

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Best Books for New Project Managers

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Are you just starting out in project management? There are so many books out there. How do you know where to start? In this video I share 3 books that are fantastic reads for new project managers. Under the video you’ll see details for each of the books. The Project Management Book by Richard Newton. One day I hope to meet Richard! This is a very useful text for new project managers and those who are starting out managing projects in a more formal environment.

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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 Best Trello Alternatives: 10 Top Kanban Tools That Will Improve Your Project Workflow

The Digital Project Manager

The post The Best Trello Alternatives: 10 Top Kanban Tools That Will Improve Your Project Workflow appeared first on The Digital Project Manager.

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Using DACI Framework for Better Group Decisions

ProjectManager.com

DACI is a project management framework used to clearly define the roles of the various stakeholders on a project. DACI stands for Driver, Approver, Contributor and Informed. These roles, defined by DACI, make it clear who has authority in certain areas and situations. This allows a project to progress smoothly whenever group decisions have to be made.

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Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Project Management Strategies

LiquidPlanner

“How long is that going to take?” As project managers, we’re driven by dates. Customers, senior managers and stakeholders all want to know how long it will take to complete a project. And as project management professionals, we’re also measured by our ability to predict the future and be right about our predictions—despite the many unknowns.

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How to Use Paraverbal Communication for More Powerful Engagement

Project Bliss

You’re hopefully choosing your words carefully and crafting the message you want others to take away. But words alone aren’t enough. Your paraverbal communication plays a big role in how your audience sees you. It’s important to consider this facet of your communication when speaking to your audience, no matter the size. Not just what you say, but how you say it, plays a big role in how successful your communication skills are.

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Escaping the Predictability Trap

Scrum.org

It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, and yet we engage in an unconscious fiction of predictability every day. We work in an uncertain world, and our main goal in pursuing agility is to confront the unknown, and in doing so, to master it. Pursuing predictability causes us to lay a veneer of fiction over the real world, making it conform to a plan of what we would like to believe is true rather than what really is. .

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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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Stressed Out? 7 Ways to Boost Work Productivity By Saying “No”

ProjectManager.com

If you feel overworked and under-productive, you’re not alone. The modern workplace moves at lightning speed in a million different directions. It’s well-documented in the ongoing discussion of work productivity that we are working more hours than ever, and at the same time, our workplace productivity per hour is slipping. I blame it on the word “Yes.

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No bugs in agile?!?

Kiron Bondale

When a team is following an agile delivery approach and they have developed a Definition of Done (DoD) containing one or more criteria indicating that no defects are permitted in or as an outcome of completed work items, they should not have to deal with bugs escaping a sprint, and hence, the practice of documenting defects should become obsolete. But how often does this happen in the real world?

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Getting to done, even in Agile!

Musings on Project Management

Now we're getting somewhere! No less an Agile/Scrum eminence than Mike Cohn -- author of some really good books and articles -- has come out with a newsletter on -- are you ready for this? -- what's the meaning of DONE in Agile. His acronym, a bit a poor choice to my mind, is "DoD". definition of done. But, there you have it. perhaps a new GAAP "generally accepted agile practice" for.

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Scrum Master: The Master of the Art of Facilitation

Scrum.org

. . Hello, great people of the world. In the previous article, we have discussed how Scrum Masters need to master many things. In this article we are going to discuss one of the stances that the Scrum Master need to master, that is the facilitation stance. A great Scrum Master is a great facilitator, otherwise, the Scrum Master will be seen as not more than a master of ceremony or even an event organiser.

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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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How to Set Start and Finish Dates in LiquidPlanner

LiquidPlanner

When you’re first starting out with LiquidPlanner, it can feel a bit like you’re taking your hands off the wheel. Typically, project schedules are built out by charting planned start and finish dates and working backwards to adhere to that plan as much as possible. LiquidPlanner turns this around by factoring in the realities that projects face and calculating these dates for you.

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8 Project Proposal Essentials to Get Manager Buy-In (with Free Template)

Planio

In most companies there are significantly more good ideas than there are time, money, and resources to bring those ideas to fruition. From new features and updates to updating processes or making things more efficient, it’s hard to always know what’s the best use of the limited resources you have. Getting buy-in for your project, whether it’s a new feature, update, website, or service, is a key part of your job as a project manager.

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7 Essential Project Planning Concepts that Work

PM Basics

Planning is science and art. Whatever you call it, it is a challenging and complex process. A plan should be feasible, challenging, realistic, usable, efficient and optimal. It is difficult. I get it! Below are the project planning concepts that will help you to deliver a plan that leads to project success. Believe it or not, small and medium projects rely on proper planning more than large ones.

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Projects and Products in Scrum

Scrum.org

"I travel around the world constantly promoting my projects and endorsing products." - Paris Hilton. Agile coaching is a journey into irony. One of the chief discoveries you can make on this voyage is that the more experienced you become, the worse at the job others often think you get. For example, you might appear less sure about your ability to bring off projects "faster and cheaper".

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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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Gantt chart vs. Kanban: what to choose for your project?

Proofhub

Have you already realized that project management is not something purely professional? Have you noticed that projects are already everywhere and everyone can be named a project manager? If you still haven’t, here is the truth: projects literally entered almost all spheres and parts of our lives. If you are planning to renovate your apartment during the vacation period, this is your personal project.

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What Is a PMO? (Infographic)

Wrike

Project management is a discipline loaded with acronyms: PMP, PRINCE2, CPM, WBS, PMBOK, PMI… and about 150 others. Whether or not you’re a project manager by title, one acronym you’re sure to hear more often is PMO. “What is PMO?” you might ask. PMO stands for “project management office.” Project management offices have exploded in popularity over the last decade.

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The Best Project Management Podcasts

Susanne Madsen

Personal and professional growth should be one of the highest priorities on anyone’s to-do-list. Progressing, expanding and getting better at what we do is one of the fundamental human needs that we all have. Some of us love to read and others like to attend events or workshops. Podcasts is yet another way to learn which has become increasingly popular over the last ten years – and with good reason!

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There’s no big difference between Scrum and Kanban so pick one and get on with it

Scrum.org

Don’t say this too loudly around agile conferences, but when it comes to the day-to-day work, Scrum and Kanban are basically the same. Now, as an attendee of these conferences and an enthusiastic participant in discussions on pull systems; time boxes; empirical process control; and little’s law, I admit that it’s satisfying to go deep into these issues.

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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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8 Ways to Ramp up Your Productivity When You Work From Home

Proofhub

When people find out you work from home, they probably turn into a bit of a skeptic. Many imagine a day at the home office as a person sitting in their PJs, eating snacks and watching TV. Of course, as a remote worker, you know this isn’t the case. And in fact, science has your back. Early research has shown work-from-homers are often more productive than their in-office counterparts.

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How to Make a Checklist to Improve Your Productivity

Teamweek

Remember that time when you completely winged a project and everything worked out just fine? If you’re struggling to remember, it’s most likely because that never happened. You have to be prepared before facing any project. And the best way to be prepared is to make a checklist. In this article, we’ll discuss a little about why checklists are so important, and some ideas you can use when you create your own.

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From Surviving to Thriving: 3 Challenges PMOs Need to Conquer Now

Wrike

The day Lydia Agnese started her new role as PMO manager at Northstar Travel Group, she received some big news. “They told me we were switching from waterfall to agile— and I would be leading the transition,” she says. “I went home to my husband and said ‘I’m gonna be busy.’” . Northstar Travel Group , a leading B2B information, business intelligence, commerce, and events platform serving the global travel and meetings industry, is growing fast.

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The great "Scrum vs Kanban" debate can be a distraction, so pick one and get on with it!

Scrum.org

Don’t say this too loudly around agile conferences, but when it comes to the day-to-day work, Scrum and Kanban teams are very similar. Now, as an attendee of these conferences and an enthusiastic participant in discussions on pull systems; time boxes; empirical process control; and little’s law, I admit that it’s satisfying to go deep into these issues.

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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.