New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 30 – December 6. We give you a high-level view so you can read what interests you. Recommended:
Must read!
- Patti Gilchrist recommends reducing the cost of poor quality with a risk-based testing strategy. And like most good project strategies, it starts at the beginning.
- Art Petty encourages us to become more discriminating consumers of leadership content – getting away from the “happy talk” and digging into the dirty details.
- Susanne Madsen details an approach for “up-skilling” an organization’s project managers.
Established Methods
- Jeff Collins lists his top ten project management thought leaders to follow in 2016.
- Justin Stoltzfus identifies trends in business intelligence and data analysis for 2016.
- Todd Williams builds on an earlier post, on avoiding litigation when managing a project on behalf of a customer.
- Nick Pisano continues his series on a general theory of project management, based on research into complex adaptive systems.
- Elizabeth Harrin details “most effective practices” in business requirements management.
- Harry Hall checklists the questions new team members need to have answered.
- Gina Abudi identifies three challenges uncovered in a survey of managers who lead virtual teams, and strategies to handle them.
- Martin Coomber demonstrates a few Visio process modeling productivity hacks.
Agile Methods
- Glen Alleman notes that Agile at scale, in software-intensive systems-of-systems, is a very different Agile from five to eight developers in a room together.
- Madhavi Ledalla expounds on release planning and release management – two critical techniques for delivering working software in iterations.
- Esther Derby suggests that the team needs to understand what the product does, from the user’s point of view.
- Mike Cohn provides an example of how to use a zero-point estimate on a user story.
- Johanna Rothman starts a series on applying Agile methods to hardware development projects.
- Reuben Salisbury gives us five reasons why a physical Scrum board beats the one you can access from anywhere, on a variety of devices.
Applied Leadership
- Eric Johnson provides an executive-level bit of advice: be quick to listen and slow to react.
- Bruce Harpham summarizes key lessons from “The Truth About Employee Engagement,” by Patrick Lencioni.
- Colin Ellis identifies five “types” of project managers, based on their observable behaviors.
- Bertrand Duperrin says that humans must learn to work with robots – not because humans will be replaced, but because collaboration has more potential.
- Seth Godin notes that it isn’t economically viable (or even possible) to please some percentage of your customers.
Podcasts and Videos
- Cornelius Fichtner interviews Richard Larson on his PMI Global Congress presentation, “Entrepreneurial Business Analysis Practitioner.” Just 17 minutes, safe for work.
- Jesse Fewell shares a rant: why would you even want to go Agile? It shouldn’t just be “fear of missing out;” you should be seeking transformation. Just five minutes, safe for work.
- Elise Stevens interviews Marie Longworth on managing remote vendors. Just 18 minutes, safe for work.
Enjoy!