New PM Articles for the Week of January 25 – 31

Posted on by

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!