Sat.Jul 16, 2016 - Fri.Jul 22, 2016

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5 Tips To Re-Energise Your Daily Standup Meetings

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Regular readers will know that I’m not an expert in Agile, by any means. So I’m delighted to bring you this guest contribution by Elisa Cepale who lives and breathes this stuff in her day job. Elisa, over to you…. Elisa Cepale. I facilitate daily standup meetings for our support team. When I started working for White October we followed the conventional “scrum” format, where the team get together, share what’s new, what’s challenging and what’s happening, and everyone gives feedback

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8 Ways You Can Better Respond to Unrealistic Demands

Project Risk Coach

This is a guest post from Colin Gautrey, an author, trainer and executive coach who has specialized in the field of power and influence for over ten years. He combines solid research with deep personal experience in corporate life to offer his audiences critical yet simple insights into how to achieve results with greater influence. He is the creator of the Stakeholder Influencing Masterclass.

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Strategic weakness

Musings on Project Management

And when your strategy depends on someone else doing something that's pretty weak strategy Jeff Roe. Politcal strategist Well, yes, but no. Certainly, self-sufficiency is the better game plan, but who gets to play in that green field? Certainly not PMs which are at the behest of sponsors, customers, and other business interests. If they don't behave and get on the same page with the.

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Report Roundup: 5 Project Reports You Don’t Want to Miss and How to Use Them

LiquidPlanner

It’s been a busy summer here at LiquidPlanner headquarters! Just a couple of weeks ago, we released some product updates that we’re pretty excited about. We made big improvements to workload visualization and forecasting, and added a new way to find and run reports from the main projects view. One report, in particular, got a major upgrade — it’s called the Project Workload report and it’s been the star of the show because it provides a simple and effective way to manage your project team

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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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4 Key Drivers For Team Engagement

Rebel’s Guide to PM

I’m still constantly surprised when I hear that people work in a command and control style management hierarchy. It’s not something I’ve been part of for years and I don’t believe it works – at least not in a project management, office-based environment. If I was a frontline soldier I would probably think differently. I talk to a lot of project managers though, and it still seems that some of them are stuck in environments where being told what to do is the norm.

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How project managers can master transformational change

Moira Alexander

Before you can help implement change management, you need to understand what this broadly used term in the context of project management. Change management is a discipline that allows businesses to effectively and precisely identify and document anticipated changes to the business as well as understand how those changes affect individuals in terms of their workflows/processes.

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Unknowable in the risk spectrum

Musings on Project Management

Would you agree that safety risk guru Matthew Squair has it about right that this is a fair representation of the risk spectrum? Actually, I'm not so sure about the "Is it possible" controlling and mitigating for ontological uncertainty (Squair defines ontological uncertain this way: "Ontological uncertainty lies at the far end of our continuum and. represents a state of complete ignorance.

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My first meeting with my project sponsor

Ron Rosenhead

This could be an interesting meeting as it is the first time you have met and you want this to go well, setting a good direction for the project. It follows then that you need to start thinking about the preparation that is required for this meeting. There is a wide range of preparation you could do which means it really needs to be focused on what you want to achieve.

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How to Become a More Challenging Project Leader

LiquidPlanner

If you want to be a strong project manager and leader, you need to know how to challenge and support your team members in equal measure. This means that you are able to set clear performance targets that stretch the individual while at the same time providing them with the support they need to reach their targets. While it might sound easy in theory, it’s far more difficult in practice.

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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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Assessing Value Produced in Exchange for the Cost to Produce the Value

Herding Cats

A common assertion in the Agile community is we focus on Value over Cost. Both are equally needed. Both must be present to make informed decisions. Both are random variables. As random variables, both need estimates to make informed decisions. To assess value produced by the project we first must have targets to steer toward. A target Value must be measured in units meaningful to the decision makers.

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How to Turn Stakeholder Conflict on Its Head

Project Risk Coach

Project managers encounter conflict regularly over schedules, project priorities, human resources, requirements, and technical opinions, to name a few. Individuals, groups, and organizations have different opinions, sometimes strong opinions. These conflicts may surface internally, as well as externally. Courtesy of Adobe Stock. I remember a project that I managed where the organization wanted to create a customer service representative (CSR) position.

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Podcast 92 – How to incorporate feedback into your leadership style

Fix my Project Chaos

Incorporating feedback into your leadership style In this podcast, change management consultant Gillian Klette talks to me about incorporating feedback into your leadership style. Gillian has more than 20 years experience in change management and project management, most recently with Queensland Urban Utilities and Oakton and previously with the Queensland Department of Tourism, Major Events, Small […].

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Why Ranged Estimates Are More Effective Than Single Point Estimates

LiquidPlanner

In project management, the only thing you can be sure of is uncertainty. And change. This is why making ranged estimates for your projects is more realistic and reliable than aiming for a singular deadline. Why? Let’s start with a real-world example. We use ranged estimates all the time in daily life. For example, if someone asks you how long it takes to drive to work, you’ll probably say “between 20 and 35 minutes,” not “23 minutes.

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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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Symptoms versus Root Causes

Herding Cats

There is a popular graph showing project performance versus the estimated project performance in " Schedule Estimation and Uncertainty Surrounding the Cone of Uncertainty ," Todd Little, IEEE Software , May/June 2006. . This chart (above) shows data from samples of software development projects and is used by many in the agile community and by #NoEstimates advocates to conjecture that estimates are usually wrong.

2006 30
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Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru: Interview With Joe Berlinger

Project Management Hacks

Tony Robbins is a larger than life figure who has been leading seminars around the world for decades. Some people remember Robbins from his TV infomercials. Others know about him through books like “ Money: Master The Game ” and “ Awaken The Giant Within.” Outside of his business and writing, Robbins is also an active in charities through his foundation – the Basket Brigade has provided assistance to millions of people over the past few decades.

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31 Free Data Visualization Tools

GanttPRO Project Management

Mastering the data is only half the battle. You still need data visualization tools and data storytelling techniques to explain what you’ve discovered. For instance, you can deploy a fascinating […].

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Give a Damn: Why You Need A Mentorship Relationship

Function Point

So I’ll admit it: I need my ass kicked every now and again. Surprise, surprise. But let me ask you this: what if I don’t care about having my backside kicked — as long as it serves a purpose and provides a positive outcome? As a business owner, you always have to be on top of your game. You know what I’m talking about. Sometimes you’ll have thoughts you can’t share with your board or your team, and this is exactly where a trusted and respected mentor or coach falls into place.

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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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Quote of the Day

Herding Cats

Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit. This notion of the basis of all good discussions. It is also the basis of discussions that get in trouble. For example, I sit in a FAR 34.2/DFARS 234.2 Federal Procurement paradigm and a similar paradigm for Enterprise IT based in ISO 12207, ITIL V3.1, CMMI, or similar governance processes. Both these domains are guided by a Governance framework for spending other people's money, planning for that spend, performing the work, reporting the work, and tak

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From The PMI Power Talks [Video]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

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, the Power Talks brought together 4 fantastic speakers for an afternoon of discussion and debate focused on strategy execution. I think this is the link to the replay of the event: https://thepmchannel.vimsy.co/collection/53/pmi-strategy-execution-powertalks but it was all afternoon so be prepared to flick through the video as you don’t want to be sitting th

PMI 150
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31 Free Data Visualization Tools

GanttPRO Project Management

Mastering the data is only half the battle. You still need data visualization tools and data storytelling techniques to explain what you’ve discovered.

40
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Give a Damn: Why You Need A Mentorship Relationship

Function Point

So I’ll admit it: I need my ass kicked every now and again. Surprise, surprise. But let me ask you this: what if I don’t care about having my backside kicked — as long as it serves a purpose and provides a positive outcome? As a business owner, you always have to be on top of your game. You know what I’m talking about. Sometimes you’ll have thoughts you can’t share with your board or your team, and this is exactly where a trusted and respected mentor or coach falls into place.

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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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Reality of the Value of Estimating

Herding Cats

Avoid software project horror stories - check the reality value of the estimate first from Harold van Heeringen.

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Testing. how much testing?

Musings on Project Management

Consider this quote from Tony Hoare: One can construct convincing proofs quite readily of the ultimate futility of exhaustive testing of a program and even of testing by sampling. So how can one proceed? The role of testing, in theory, is to establish the base propositions of an inductive proof. You should convince yourself, or other people, as firmly as possible, that if the program works a.

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4 Simple Hacks to Try Right Now for a More Productive Team

TeamGantt

Being productive in the face of distraction can be tough. Reduce task switching and dramatically improve your team's productivity with these 4 hacks.

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The Best Way to Face Challenges? Together.

PMStudent

Why is that some teams allow the challenges they face to become obstacles, while others band together and grow stronger? Support from their leaders and from one another is a contributing factor. The post The Best Way to Face Challenges? Together. appeared first on PMStudent.

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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.