Sat.Aug 13, 2016 - Fri.Aug 19, 2016

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The risky side of project management

Moira Alexander

Risks are dependant on a multitude of things and serve as triggers. These dependencies help to identify and measure the impact of the risks; here are just a few of these dependencies. Product and service offerings. Client, vendor, sponsor and project team expectations. Location. Industry norms. Buy-in levels. Cultural differences. Once the dependencies can be determined, it becomes much clearer which of the following risks are likely: Cost overruns.

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How to Improve Your Project Communication

Project Risk Coach

In my project management workshops, I ask this question, “What are the top causes of project failure?” Nine times out of ten, I hear an answer — among others — related to poor communication. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock (edited in Canva). There are many ways in which project managers communicate — coaching, summarizing action items, influencing a stakeholder, educating team members, listening, facilitating decisions, creating a contract with a third party, escalati

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Are you done?

Kiron Bondale

One of the challenges of traditional project delivery approaches is that team members often treat the completion of their own tasks as proof of project progress. This perception gets reinforced by project managers or their people managers who will give these team members a pat on the back for getting their assigned tasks completed on time. One of the original twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto is Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile 149
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6 Ways to Manage Projects Like a Nordic

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This is a guest article from Kayleigh Töyrä, coming to us from Bristol but with her roots firmly in Finland. The Nordic countries are frequently featured in the news for their egalitarian lifestyles, high performing education systems and technological innovations. Taking a leaf out of the Nordics’ book can help you rethink how you manage your projects.

Energy 172
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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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Bangers and Mash

The Lazy Project Manager

Now if you are from the UK you will 100% know what I am talking about, and if you are from Canada, Australia or New Zealand (I am reliably informed) you will also have a good chance of knowing what ‘bangers and mash’ are. But, if you are from elsewhere and haven’t had the personal pleasure of enjoying a mouthful of ‘bangers and mash’ (tasty) then you are probably completely confused.

PMO 163

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Helping Small Teams Do Big Things: LiquidPlanner Small Team Edition

LiquidPlanner

It’s easy to think that if you’re part of a small team, you can manage projects without difficulty. Your communication system is easy: you simply call out to someone across the office. Whiteboards, spreadsheets , emails—who needs a specialized project management system? You’ve got this! But, wait. The idea that small teams don’t need help managing their work is something of a myth.

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Sustainable Development Goal #6, Clean Water and Sanitation & Project Management

Green Project Management

This week’s post focuses on SDG #6 of 17, Clean Water and Sanitation. It is amazing that 75% of our planet is covered in water yet there are entire countries that have limited access to drinkable clean water. There are several goals tied to this SDG but first, let me share some startling facts. 1 […]. The post Sustainable Development Goal #6, Clean Water and Sanitation & Project Management appeared first on Delivering a better world, one project at a time.

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Value and the Needed Units of Measure to Make Decisions

Herding Cats

For some reason the notion if value is a big mystery in the agile community. Many blogs, tweets, books are spent of speaking about Value as the priority in agile software development. We focus on Value over cost. We produce Value at the end of every Sprint Value is the most important aspect of Scrum based development. Without units of measure of Value beyond time and money, there can be not basis of comparison between one value based choice and another.

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Evaluating prospects -- alternatives

Musings on Project Management

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky may be a project manager's best friends when it comes to understanding decision making under conditions of risk. . Of course, they've written a lot good stuff over the years.my favorite is "Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases". The original prospect thinking Tversky and Kahneman are the original thinkers behind prospect theory.

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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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5 Common Problems for Small Project Teams

LiquidPlanner

“Small is beautiful.” So championed British economist E. F. Schumacher , and those of us who have worked in small teams are highly likely to agree. Small teams (10 and under) often work on highly complex problems, in fast-moving environments and with a high degree of trust. A great team can deliver amazing projects and create bonds that go far beyond the office, with team members becoming lifelong friends.

Lean 90
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10 Benefits of Using a Gantt Chart For Your Next Project

TeamGantt

Why use Gantt charts for your project management efforts? Here are 10 advantages & benefits of creating Gantt charts for your team's project plans.

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Connecting Project Benefits to Business Strategy for Success

Herding Cats

The current PMI Pulse titled Delivering Value: Focus on Benefits during Project Execution provides some guidance on how to manage the benefits side of an IT project. But the article misses the mark on an important concept. This is a chart in the paper, suggesting the metrics of the benefits. But where do these metrics come from? The question is where do the measures of the benefits listed in the above chart come from?

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Why Creatives Should Think About Project Management

Wrike

In a perfect world, creatives would spend 100% of their time doing what they love: write, design, film, build, and create! However, this isn’t the reality for most creatives. There are client requests, feedback, edits, and meetings on top of meetings. Some creatives don’t even have enough time left to actually be creative. What’s the solution to this?

Process 44
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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 LiquidPlanner Approaches Collaboration to Improve Teamwork and Productivity

LiquidPlanner

Collaboration. Teamwork. Impeccable lines of communication. Working together seamlessly, producing work that defines industries and leads markets. This is what we all want—powerful modes of collaboration that bring out the best performances in individuals, teams and businesses. But what do we mean when we say “collaboration?” Everyone wants to collaborate!

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Project Initiation Checklist [Free Download]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

This month’s free template is a project initiation checklist. This is the first page of the Project Initiation Checklist. It’s a quick way to speed up finding out what you need to know from your project sponsor when you meet for the first time. Covering everything from what they think success looks like to who else needs to be involved, you can use it as a prompt to help you get your project off to a great start.

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A Growth Job

Herding Cats

Is never permanent. Makes you like yourself. Is fun. Is sometimes tedious, painful, frustrating, monotonous, and at the same time gives a sense of accomplishment. Bases compensation on productivity. Is complete: One thinks, plans, manages and is the final judge of one's work. Addresses real need in the world are large - people want what you do because they need it.

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What To Do When Assigned a Project With an Imposed Date [Video]

Project Risk Coach

If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here. The post What To Do When Assigned a Project With an Imposed Date [Video] appeared first on.

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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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Escape From Shallow Work with “Deep Work” (Book Review)

Project Management Hacks

I finished reading Cal Newport ‘s new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World a few days ago. It has adjusted my thinking on productivity. The classic productivity books like Getting Things Done by David Allen (want to know more? read this: Leading Yourself With Getting Things Done ) are often interpreted as a ‘task management system.’ Newport’s book argues that raw task accomplishment is not enough.

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Some Inspirational Quotes for Managers

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Here’s a collection of some of my favourite quotes of the moment. If you’re interested, I made it with iMovie, which is a fantastic app and perfect for doing this kind of short clip. You'll also like: From The PMI Power Talks [Video] Here’s my video diary of the PMI Power Talks this week (about 4 minutes, safe for work). Hosted by the PMI UK Chapter in London, Social Media for Project Managers: survey Happy New Year!

PMI 158
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Invoking "Laws" Without a Domain or Context

Herding Cats

It seems to be common invoke Laws in place of actual facts when trying to support a point. Here's two recent ones I've encountered with some Agile and #NoEstimates advocates. Two of my favorite are: Goodhart's Law. Hofstadter's law. These are not Laws in the same way as the Laws of Physics, Laws of Chemistry, Laws of Queuing theory - which is why it's so easy to misapply them, misuse them, use them to obviscate the situation and hide behind fancy terms which have no meaning to the problem at h

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Why I’ve Lost My Way As a Project Manager

Ron Rosenhead

I read a lot of blogs and articles and I came across this from Elizabeth Harrin who runs a site called a Girls Guide to Project Management. It is a frank and open article and with Elizabeth’s permission I have reproduced this below. The original article can be found here. Since maternity leave I’ve been in a more operational job. For a while I had staff management responsibilities (although I’ve lost those very recently).

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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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How to manage your post summer panic

Susanne Madsen

​As summer is quickly drawing to a close many of us will be refocusing our efforts on work and on optimizing the way that we run our projects. But some may feel slightly uneasy about getting back to work and overwhelmed at the thought of everything that needs to get done before the end of the year. What better time then to look ourselves in the mirror and ensure that we are prepared for a hectic autumn with all its challenges?

Lean 60
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Podcast 95 – How conflict can lead to creativity and innovation in projects

Fix my Project Chaos

Let’s talk about how conflict can lead to creativity and innovation in projects In this podcast, project management industry thought-leader Lee Lambert speaks to me about how conflict can lead to creativity and innovation in projects. Lee has been working in project management for nearly 45 years, implementing processes and programs in 22 countries.

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Range of Domains in Sofwtare Development

Herding Cats

Once again I've encountered a conversation about estimating where there was a broad disconnect between the world I work in - Software Intensive System of Systems - and our approach to Agile software development, and someone claiming things that would be unheard of here. Here's a briefing I built to sort out where on the spectrum you are, before proceeding further with what works in your domain may actually be forbidden in mine. .

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Avaza Adds Sub-Tasks to Project Management Module

Avaza

Sub-tasks has been one of the most heavily demanded features, and it’s finally here. You can now break larger tasks down into smaller pieces, making it easier to get through the entire task. Team members can easily view sub-tasks on each task in the Project-level view, and through the task itself. Adding Sub-Tasks. Adding sub-tasks is extremely simple.

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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.