New project management articles published on the web during the week of October 15 – 21, 2012.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Aaron Smith condenses the ten most important points in Schlacter and Hildebrandt’s “Leading Business Change for Dummies.”
• Elizabeth Harrin and Phil Peplow have written a new book, “Customer-Centric Project Management.”
• Karol McCloskey tells of a product design team that went off to live with their prospective customers for three weeks, to determine what was important to them.
• Kailash Awati considers four different theories of “truth,” in explaining why your enterprise data warehouse might not be as truthful as the executives hoped.
• Jennifer Demski interviews key players at the Virginia Community College System and Loyola University to get their take on project selection and prioritization.
• Soma Bhattacharya uses President Obama’s “standardized” wardrobe as a starting point for establishing focus (on the important stuff).
• Cheri Baker shares some tips for addressing the big, complex problems – think monsters, dragons, and elephants.  What, no lions, tigers, or bears?  Oh, well …
• Lynda Bourne wants us to make our project communications really sing, and invokes both Ludvig von Beethoven and Freddie Mercury as examples.
• Kerry Wills provides some examples that show where project managers can provide structure.
• Bruce Benson says we need to do some things daily in order to “get” them.  And that includes using metrics based on real measurements.
• Dick Billows presents a “four cornered” technique for showing trade-offs between scope, duration, cost, and risk.
• Johanna Rothman argues that managers need to coach their new hires to success.
• Preben Ormen notes that risk perception is at least partially a function of age.
• Andrea Brockmeier shows how developing a risk breakdown structure can stimulate the team to identify project-relevant risk events.
• Marian Haus provides some guidelines for effective requirements prioritization.
• Ron Rosenhead has some pointers for that new PM, assigned that first project.
• Shim Marom reminds us that “transition to support” is just as important as delivering on time and on budget.

Enjoy!