Sat.Sep 24, 2016 - Fri.Sep 30, 2016

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How to choose the right project management methodology

Moira Alexander

In " How to pick a project management methodology (PMM) ," I covered the some of the most recognized methodologies, as well as a few high-level factors, that may impact selection decisions. These methodologies are repeatable, effective and efficient processes that help organizations streamline project activities. Because these processes, once developed, can be documented and repeated, they help organizations to spend less time focusing on how to execute the project itself, and more time on the p

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8 Things All Bad Project Managers Have in Common

Project Risk Coach

Bad project managers create project cultures filled with stress, confusion, and little progress. Unfortunately, many of these individuals are not aware of their behaviors. Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock. Let’s run through a list of eight things that all bad project managers have in common. And let’s talk about things to do to remedy these behaviors.

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How many licks does it take to get to the centre of a lollipop?

The Lazy Project Manager

I saw the above recently and a) I wondered why does that matter and who cares anyway, and then I thought b) you mean someone has actually investigated this? I saw the headline on an article from Live Science where it was explained that science now has an answer to the famous question asked in the iconic Tootsie Roll Pop commercial (no idea what that is?

PMO 202
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The business case is implicit in what we do

Ron Rosenhead

Not my words but the words of a client. She is a senior executive asking for some support. Below is the substance of the conversation starting with what do you mean by that? Client: Well, because of the nature of the business, it’s already within what we do. Ron Rosenhead (RR): Would you mind if I questioned that? Client: Well….yes …OK. RR: The business case is the justification for the existence of the project on the basis of its benefits to the business or stakeholders.

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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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Business Acumen for Project Managers [Free Checklist]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

‘Business acumen’ is one of those skills that you see on role profiles for jobs. It’s also something mentioned in the standards for professional project management bodies. Apparently, business acumen is something that project managers should have. I believe that my success at working with senior stakeholders and on difficult projects is to do with business acumen.

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How Do You Plan for the Unknown? See How LiquidPlanner Customer Project Creation Studio Does It

LiquidPlanner

For the past year and a half, Ian MacDuff has been testing a new approach to managing customer work with great success. As Vice President of Client Engagement at Product Creation Studio (PCS), a Seattle-based design and engineering firm, MacDuff is a seasoned product engineer and team leader. He and his ace team at PCS are responsible for helping aspiring innovators in the technology and healthcare industries develop some of the world’s most recognizable and interesting products.

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How to become a more engaging facilitator of project workshops

Susanne Madsen

​A growing number of project managers ask me how they can become better at facilitating project definition workshops, kick-off meetings, requirements gathering workshops and lessons learnt sessions. The fact that people ask me is great, as it shows that project managers are adapting to the need for more collaborative and engaging ways of working.

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How to "Digitize" the Top Performers

Ganttic

Motivating your talented and extraordinary workers cannot be done with conventional rewards like company hosted retreats and free lunches alone. Rather, you should implement better technology in the workplace. With the right software, hardware, networking and mobile tools, you will increase the productivity of your best workers significantly. Here are some ideas that you can apply to encourage your top performers to become more productive: Facilitate Mobile Learning If you want your best employe

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Five Immutable Principles of Project Success and Project Failure

Herding Cats

I saw a blog post about the Top 5 Reasons Your Project Fails recently. They were all good reasons, but those reasons were symptoms, not causes. We seem to always identify the symptoms, but until we fix the cause of failure, those symptoms will return. The symptoms were: Priorities change. Incomplete requirements. Lack of Resources. Lack of User Support.

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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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How to Use the GPM P5 Impact Analysis

Green Project Management

“Risk comes from not knowing what you`re doing.” Warren Buffett “Risk is like fire: If controlled it will help you; if uncontrolled it will rise up and destroy you.” Theodore Roosevelt What is the P5 Impact Analysis? The GPM Global PRiSM methodology advocates for the usage of the GPM Global P5 Impact Analysis, which […]. The post How to Use the GPM P5 Impact Analysis appeared first on Delivering a better world, one project at a time.

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What We’re Reading: Planning, Procrastinating and Penning

LiquidPlanner

Happy Friday! Time to take a deep breath, wrap up your work for the week and dive into a few interesting articles about planning, time blocks, writing masterfully and procrastination. Try implementing some of these practices. on Monday. Enjoy! Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day – Cal Newport. You May Hate Planning, But You Should Do It Anyway – HBR.com.

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10 Guidelines for Estimating Project Effort – Guest Post by Susanne Madsen

Celoxis

Many projects start off on the wrong foot because the effort involved in delivering them has been underestimated. It is human nature to want to deliver something well and quickly, but underestimating the complexities of a project serves no one. As project managers, it is our job to make sure that the team understands what the users want and how much it will cost to produce what they want.

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Quote of the Day

Herding Cats

Never attribute to malevolence what is explicable by incompetence. - Robert J Halon. When we hear all the bad things that go wrong with projects. The misuse and abuse of data, people, tools, and processes, I get a smile when I remember Halon's quote. Removing things, changing things, installing new things will not address the root cause of bad management and especially bad project management.

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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 Agile and Scrum Changed the Way We Do Marketing

Function Point

When we decided as a marketing team that it was time to reinvent the way we worked, we looked around within the company and externally to see what other teams, not just marketing teams, were doing. What we found were mostly the typical processes (project lists, goal settings , Adaptive Framework (APF), Waterfall etc.), but we needed something that created both flexibility and accountability – enter Agile mindset with Scrum methodology.

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How To Grow Business Acumen and Business Awareness as a Project Manager (PODCAST)

Project Management Hacks

Do You Have Business Awareness. Are you aware of your business? Do you know what’s going on in your industry? I was recently interviewed by Cornelius Fichtner from The Project Management Podcast about The Growing Business Acumen and Business Awareness as a Project Manager. Here`s a listening guide to some of the key points and tips covered in the episode: 2:20: 4 reasons project managers should care about business awareness. 04:00 – how I use business awareness in financial industry

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Actually, you can't measure it

Musings on Project Management

We're told repeatedly: you can't manage what you can't measure.

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Where Are We Going, Doesn't Much Matter It Seems

Herding Cats

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where–” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”.

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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 Agile and Scrum Changed the Way We Do Marketing

Function Point

When we decided as a marketing team that it was time to reinvent the way we worked, we looked around within the company and externally to see what other teams, not just marketing teams, were doing. What we found were mostly the typical processes (project lists, goal settings , Adaptive Framework (APF), Waterfall etc.), but we needed something that created both flexibility and accountability – enter Agile mindset with Scrum methodology.

SCRUM 40
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Next Generation Project Management Software

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Digitalization and Collaboration. The project and portfolio management (PPM) software market is changing. It is changing so fast that it’s hard for practitioners to keep up with the latest offerings. This is an edited version of a white paper I wrote with some colleagues for the PMI EMEA Summit in Barcelona. In this article we look at emerging software in the PPM space and discuss how its selection and implementation needs to be done in line with an overarching digital strategy.

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Why Choose a Real Project Management App over Excel

TeamGantt

Making the switch to a real project management app can make your job as a PM much easier, and possibly even fun.

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Quote of the Day

Herding Cats

The essence of mathematics is to not make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple - Stan Gudder . This notion that estimating is hard, estimating are a waste because they are always wrong, willfully ignore the basic mathematics of making decisions of in presence if uncertainty.

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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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Risk management for agile projects

Kiron Bondale

What are the implications to project risk management when you choose to deliver a project using an agile approach? Here are a few similarities: Risk needs to be managed through the project’s lifetime, not just at the very beginning. Even though the team might tackle high risk requirements earlier in the life of an agile project than they might a traditional one, this doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t keep an eye on threats and opportunities through late stage iterations.

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What I’m Reading: Banned Books

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Normally my occasional column about the project management books I’m reading and the novels I’m carrying around reflects what I’ve spent time on in the last six weeks or so. But today, in honour of Banned Books Week I’m taking a more long-term view of what I’ve read. Here are 11 books that I’ve read that somewhere has banned at some point. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China.

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Staying Aware

The Tao of Project Management

Topsham RFC There is a lot going on at the club at the moment both on and off the pitch. The next big event is Bonfire Night, and as it falls on a Saturday this year and our 1st XV are at home it could be massive. I'm leaving the details to the Bar and Events sub-committee this year but I'm also making sure I'm aware of what's going on. One sure sign of a poor project manager is one who doesn’t know what's going on in his project.

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Estimating Resources

Herding Cats

There's a never-ending opportunity to learn how to estimate in the presence of uncertainty. Here's some resources for informing that learning process. . When you hear that estimates are a waste (we'd rather be coding), estimates are fiction, we're bad at estimating, and the plethora of other excuses for not learning how to estimate, ask if that person has done the minimal homework to learn how to estimate needed to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty found on all software development p

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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.