Tag Archives: Customer Communications

Articles related to communications with management, stakeholders, and project teams

New PM Articles for the Week of December 25 – 31

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New project management articles published on the web during the (slow, holiday) week of December 25 – 31. Happy New Year!

  • Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy explains earned value management with a short example in an embedded video. 5 minutes to read, another 5 minutes for the video.
  • Glen Alleman contemplates Wilo’s Law and mature communication processes. 5 minutes to read.
  • Ryan Robinson asked 9 top technical teams what tools they used for project management, and got some interesting responses. Conspicuous by its absence was MS Project. 14 minutes to read.
  • John Goodpasture shares an actionable quote from Andrew Gelman on Big Data. 2 minutes to read.
  • Rich Mironov notes that there are multiple audiences for your product roadmap, and each has different needs. 9 minutes to read.
  • Will Fanguy notes the lessons that designers should learn from Alexa. 4 minutes to read.
  • Art Petty suggests that what we really need is daily resolutions, and he offers three of them. 3 minutes to read.
  • Scott Berkun answers the question: How can you tell a wise person when you meet one? Wisdom comes with age, although age often comes unaccompanied. 6 minutes to read.
  • Elliot Forbes explains how serverless computing will change the world in 2018. 4 minutes to read.
  • Shaun Carter and Michael Nielsen share a detailed essay on the history, present, and future of using artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence. 30 minutes or so to read.
  • Justin O’Beirne casts his cartographer’s eye on the technical evolution of Google Maps to include not just individual buildings but architectural features and asks: how does this fit in with self-driving cars? 15 minutes to read, much longer to ponder.
  • Srinivas Rao argues that calendars are more effective than to-do lists. 5 minutes to read.
  • Sam Applebee worked from 7 different countries in the space of 7 months and learned why you can’t ignore the bottom three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 6 minutes to read.
  • Alyse Kalish describes the practice and benefits of mindful eating. 2 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of November 20 – 26

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 20 – 26. And this week’s video: Mike Clayton answers the question: what is a RAG (or traffic light) report? 5 minutes, safe for work.

Must read!

  • Steve Lohr reports on the increasing attraction of the American Midwest to tech investors who have become fearful of the “craziness” in Silicon Valley. 5 minutes to read.
  • Klint Finley explains how the end of net neutrality will change the internet—for those of us in the US, at any rate. 5 minutes to read.
  • Eric Martin lists fourteen technology-enabled trends, including some social trends, that might deliver a better future for everyone. 12 minutes to read.

Established Methods

  • Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy has compiled 26 arguments illustrating the benefits of project management. 7 minutes to read.
  • Jigs Gaton applies lessons learned from the highly successful Virginia-class nuclear submarine design project to managing mundane civilian projects. 5 minutes to read.
  • Cornelius Fichtner and Simona Fallavolitta, product manager for the PMP credential, discuss the changes coming to the PMP exam on March 26, 2018. Podcast, 20 minutes, safe for work.
  • Kiron Bondale extracts project management lessons from a few fables we heard as children.3 minutes to read.
  • Aimee Baxter provides practical advice on driving change adoption, based on stakeholder engagement, listening, and then communicating. 6 minutes, safe for work.
  • Stephanie Ray tutors us on the project communications plan. 7 minutes to read.

Agile Methods

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his list of Agile content, from the group decision process to nimbly doing the wrong things to product management by committee (utterly doomed). 8 outbound links, 2 minutes to scan.
  • James Mensch describes the perfect daily stand-up (or Scrum, if you prefer). 2 minutes to read.
  • Holger Paffrath notes the relationship between Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the values espoused by the Scrum Guide. 2 minutes to read.
  • Tom Cagley has a few holiday shopping suggestions for the readers of Agile books on your list. 2 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Mike Cohn shares five lessons he’s grateful to have learned during his career. 10 minutes to read.
  • Michael Lopp describes the necessary content required for the creation of two career paths—one for individual contributors and one for managers. 7 minutes to read.
  • Lisette Sutherland recommends some ways to apply modern leadership methods in the virtual world. Podcast, 12 minutes, safe for work.
  • Pawel Brodzinski explains why he got involved in a trivial discussion—because it would change the organizational culture, ever so slightly, but irrevocably. 3 minutes to read.
  • Den Howlett reports that one of the primary reasons for Workday’s 98% customer satisfaction score is the absolute control they exercise over their implementation partners, thus keeping the playing field level. 4 minutes to read.

Technology, Techniques, and Human Behavior

  • Susan Dynarski makes the case for banning electronics during a lecture or meeting. 5 minutes to read.
  • Elizabeth Harrin reviews Mindjet MindManager 2018, a mind mapping and visual management tool. 6 minutes to read.
  • Chris Hoffman compares the new Firefox Quantum browser to Chrome. It’s apparently not merely faster, but better in other ways. 5 minutes to read.
  • Brendan Toner provides a detailed view of Scrivener, for iOS, a multi-platform author’s tool for serious long-form writing. 8 minutes to read.

Working and the Workplace

  • Coert Visser briefly explains Carol Dweck’s new theory on the foundations of personality, including her micro-theory contained in a taxonomy of needs. 5 minutes to read.
  • Cesar Abeid and Traci Duez discuss mindfulness and various myths about how the brain works. Podcast, 51 minutes, safe for work.
  • Leigh Espy tells us how gratitude, expressed consciously, can help us feel happy, healthy, and successful. 4 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of October 30 – November 5

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of October 30 – November 5. Note that Daylight Savings Time ended in North and Central America. And this week’s video: Jesse Fewell shares an excited video selfie from the PMI Global Conference in Chicago, following the launch of the Agile Practice Guide. A new era is dawning – PMI and the Agile Alliance have created non-commercial, methodology-agnostic guidelines for tailoring Agile methods to the work to be done.  5 minutes, safe for work.

Must read!

  • Michael Simmons reveals the secret to Thomas Edison’s success: the 10,000-experiment rule. “Deliberate experimentation is more important than deliberate practice.” 10 minutes to read.
  • Valerie Senyk shares some observations on what it takes to teach well. 3 minutes to read.
  • Nathan Kinch predicts that one of the outcomes of the GDPR will be closer collaboration between designers and attorneys. Privacy by design is a requirement. 6 minutes to read.

Established Methods

  • Kiron Bondale defends the use of the digraph as a risk communication tool. 2 minutes to read.
  • Harry Hall describes the steps to take in right-sizing your risk management plan.
  • Glen Alleman reinforces the concepts in an old post: Process is King. Activity must be guided to efficiently achieve goals. 3 minutes to read.
  • Bruce Garrod points out the process changes in each knowledge area of the PMBOK 6th 3 minutes to read.
  • Sam Huffman explains the best practice for entering task durations in MS Project. Less than 2 minutes to read.
  • John Goodpasture quotes Yuval Harari in caveating the predictive value of the past project history and metrics kept by every PMO. Just about a minute to read.
  • Elizabeth Harrin conducts a wide-ranging 22-minute video interview with Jon Clay, President of PMI UK. Or you can read the transcript in about 14 minutes.

Agile Methods

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly Agile round-up, from Agile experiments to Agile misconceptions, to starting stand-ups on time. 8 outbound links, 2 minutes to browse.
  • Adam Palmer puts story points and relative sizing into perspective using pumpkins. 2 minutes to read.
  • Joel Bancroft-Connors and his invisible gorilla, Hogarth, introduce an enterprise Scrum simulation game using Legos. 7 minutes to read, bring your own Legos.
  • Muslim Rizvi explains the acronym TECHMEDICS, which collects the basic considerations and questions to ask before beginning an Agile implementation. 8 minutes to read.
  • Mike Cohn shines a light on several “scary” aspects of adopting Agile methods, in honor of Halloween. 6 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Grace Windsor extols the benefits of using a project team charter to facilitate alignment and put the focus on the goals of the project. 5 minutes to read.
  • Naomi Caietti tutors us on emotional intelligence and how to develop it in ourselves. 5 minutes to read.
  • Susanne Madsen recounts her recovery from the stress she imposed on herself while leading a large, business-critical program. Sometimes, we must lead ourselves. 7 minutes to read.

Stakeholder Engagement

  • Lynda Bourne describes a complex model of stakeholder engagement, with the authentic characteristics of the organization at the core. 6 minutes to read.
  • Mike Clayton tells us how to plan a stakeholder engagement campaign. 8 minutes to read.
  • Elise Stevens interviews Nicole Nader on why being authentic is important to building effective relationships with stakeholders. Podcast, 16 minutes, safe for work.

Working and the Workplace

  • Tamás Török shares the findings on hiring software developers at start-up companies, from the State of Software Development 2017 report. 4 minutes to read.
  • Gary Poster conducts a rigorous analysis of the pros and cons of distributed teams, from “remote friendly” to “remote reliant.” 6 minutes to read.
  • Lisette Sutherland interviews Dom Price, head of R&D at Atlassian, on best practices for including remote colleagues in teams, such as team rituals. Video interview, 41 minutes.
  • Mike Griffiths reminds of the importance of focus. Just over a minute to read.

Enjoy!