New project management articles published on the web during the week of May 28 – June 3. And this week’s video: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker presents her annual internet trends report at the 2018 Code Conference. 33 minutes but well worth your time. Her 294-slide deck is here.
Must read!
- Mark Johnson tells how Ford is transitioning from auto manufacturer to mobility provider. Noted business disruptor Henry Ford would be very impressed. 6 minutes to read.
- Mike Murphy reports that Alphabet’s Waymo division is about to put around 62,000 autonomous minivans into a commercialized ride-hailing service. Take a moment to imagine the logistics for this rollout and how these vehicles will be serviced. 2 minutes to read.
- Alex Hern reports that the first GDPR complaint lawsuits have been filed against Facebook and Google. If upheld, fines could run into the billions of Euros. 3 minutes to read.
Established Methods
Esther Cohen provides a detailed set of tips for preparing and conducting exceptionally effective project kickoff meetings. 10 minutes to read.- Mike Clayton goes into details of the various risk response strategies, as expanded in the PMBOK 6th 8 minutes to read.
- Elizabeth Harrin describes the role and duties of project steering groups, sometimes called the Governance Committee. 5 minutes to read.
- Lindsay Curtis lists the Do’s and Don’ts of project management communications, from plan to delivery. 4 minutes to read.
- Heikki Hellgren tutors us on proper software requirements. 7 minutes to read.
- Nick Pisano proposes a software customer Bill of Rights—commercial practices that apply ethics to the process of marketing and selling software. 8 minutes to read.
Agile Methods
- Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from the iceberg of ignorance to misunderstanding Kanban to how amazon quantified the benefits of Amazon Prime. 3 minutes to read, 7 outbound links.
- John Yorke observes that the enemy of Agile is ego—a belief that we have achieved perfect knowledge and there is no need to learn anything else. 4 minutes to read.
- Pawel Brodzinski examines the related concepts of autonomy and alignment and emergent purpose. 5 minutes to read.
- Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy and Leigh Espy discuss the challenges of IT project management when working with complex technologies and Agile methods. Video, 10 minutes, safe for work.
- John Goodpasture gives a detailed response to a reader who challenged his statement that firm fixed-price contracts are inappropriate for contracting Agile. 4 minutes to read.
Applied Leadership
- Alexander Maasik curates his list of leadership articles, from walking out of bad meetings to minding feedback to making better decisions. 4 minutes to read, 5 outbound links.
- Alicia Liu shares a comprehensive guide to influencing behavior, from developing self-awareness and modeling desired behavior to giving actionable feedback. 13 minutes to read.
- Kiron Bondale examines the three common temporal preferences—larks, owls, and third-birds—to suggest ways we can optimize our team’s work schedule. 2 minutes to read.
Technology, Techniques, and Human Behavior
Darius Foroux explains Price’s Law—sort of a variation on the Pareto Principle. 4 minutes to read.- Raul Popa posts an FAQ for TypingDNA, a biometric technology that identifies users by the way they type. Useful for two-factor authentication. 4 minutes to read.
- Igor Ilunin describes two rapidly evolving means of human-computer interaction: voice, and soon thought recognition. 3 minutes to read.
- Gina Abudi shows how to create and refine a mind map to organize your ideas. 2 minutes to read.
Working and the Workplace
- Andrew Rundle has analyzed health data to quantify how much impact frequent business travel has on our health. Spoiler: a lot. 5 minutes to read.
- Michael Deane gives us the marketing executive’s view of how to optimize our use of social media to raise our professional visibility. 2 minutes to read.
- Hugh Beaulac explains how to procrastinate productively. 3 minutes to read.
- Gerald Weinberg unpacks the “Anti-esteem toolkit,” a set of tactics people use to maintain low self-esteem. 2 minutes to read.
Enjoy!
My latest article for AITS was published today: 
It’s important to think like a journalist when writing status reports: be clear, concise, and engage the reader by creating a narrative. Tell a story that the reader wants to finish. But not everything in your status report should be news—you also need to mix in information, showing trends and data in a digestible format. The goal should be to help your stakeholders have a better understanding of the work planned, completed, and in progress so they can make better decisions and help to champion the project.
