New project management articles published on the web during the week of January 25 – 31. And this week’s video, in memory of Paul Kantner, who passed away on January 28: Wooden Ships, live in 1988.
Must read!
- Corinne Purtill reports on a new study that indicates high-powered individuals working in a group can be less effective than a second-tier team. They spend as much energy on competition as on collaboration.
- Esther Derby tells us how to collect and present both quantitative and qualitative data and present it for use in problem-solving meetings. This article is a keeper!
- Ian Whittingham helps us apply attentiveness principles and an understanding of our cognitive biases in order to improve our information gathering.
Established Methods
- Debasis Roy proposes adding task importance as a weight to measuring progress against our project plan.
- Lynda Bourne notes that, since project risk management depends on historical data, we need to assess whether old data is still dependable.
- Harry Hall gives us a tutorial on the process of identifying risks.
- Cesar Abeid interviews Gary McGugan on change management. Just 47 minutes, safe for work.
- Elise Stevens interviews William Peg on the fine points of managing procurement through contracts. Just 28 minutes, safe for work.
- Nick Pisano argues that it is time for technology decision makers to replace “tools” thinking with “data” thinking.
Agile Methods
- Martin Abbott and Mike Fisher describe the pros and cons of an Agile Organization, using Spotify as an illustrative case.
- Daniel Zacarias explains his strategy for dealing with stakeholders who want things done their way: focus on alignment with the organization’s strategy.
- Mike Cohn reviews the Start Doing / Stop Doing / Continue Doing approach to a Sprint retrospective.
- Vyom Bharadwaj provides a short description of a product backlog and what items it might contain.
- Shane Vaz breaks down the steps to replace a traditional project delivery method with Scrum.
Applied Leadership
- Lisa McLeod retrieves key points on how some leaders exude “presence” from Suzanne Bates’ forthcoming book, “All the Leader You Can Be.”
- Elizabeth Harrin reviews “The Confidence Effect,” by Grace Killelea. If you read Elizabeth’s book, “Overcoming Imposter Syndrome,” this is an excellent follow-up.
- Art Petty enumerates the steps to take in leading your peers.
- Lindsey Patterson explores good practice in setting expectations early, so employees can be confident that they are delivering what you want.
- John Goodpasture wants us to get past the stupid question, in order to provide information that the questioner actually needs.
Pot Pouri
- Nick Heath updates us on how Amazon is using ever larger numbers of robots in pursuit of their goal to reduce order fulfillment time to 30 minutes.
- Brendan Toner reviews My Life Organized, a hierarchical task manager with an interesting “do this next” algorithm and a Getting Things Done interface.
- Jonathan Buckley describes some of the biases found in Big Data analytics.
- Erika Anderson describes a process to decide what skill to work on next.
- Ted Devine advises contingent workers: the contract is key to your success!
- Johanna Rothman shares a few questions that help assess the culture of a company – valuable in our job search.
Enjoy!