Tag Archives: PMO

New PM Articles for the Week of April 7 – 13

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NewsboyNew project management articles published on the web during the week of April 7 – 13. We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to! Recommended:

If It Heartbleeds, It Leads

  • Rusty Foster explains the HeartBleed clearly enough for just about anyone to understand.
  • Brian Leach adds his thoughts to the stream of news on Heartbleed.
  • Mashable has compiled the Heartbleed Hit List: those major sites affected and not impacted. My recommendation: change your passwords, anyway. Just wait until those sites who admit to a problem have announced a solution, before you change that password. Meantime, don’t log in!

PM Best Practices

  • Chad Baker recounts a recent lessons learned session where the team explored what went well, and found a useful recommendation for future projects.
  • Bart Gerardi continues his series on “watermelon projects” with an ounce of prevention.
  • Elizabeth Harrin reviews “Trust in Virtual Teams,” by Thomas P. Wise.
  • Scott Berkun enumerates the ways in which remote work improves diversity.
  • Lynda Bourne reveals the potential impact of differing cultural perceptions of the relative importance of past, present, and future.
  • Roberto Toledo explains how to reduce the time required to plan a project, with a Project Planning Acceleration Project.
  • Ireti Oke-Pollard reminds us to give the operations folks “a seat at the table” during our project, so we don’t deliver something that they can economically support.
  • Zach Watson gives the elevator pitch for five Open Source project management alternatives.
  • Mike Clayton sings the praises of spreadsheets, and recommends a great resource for creative solutions using Excel.
  • Bruce McGraw gets back to the basics with project communication.
  • Joe Crumpler has found a gap in his skill set – call it business storytelling.

Agile Methods

  • Johanna Rothman continues her series on designing your Agile project, with a look at how the team will interact with management.
  • Pawel Brodzinski makes the case for unscaling Agile. That’s right: think smaller!
  • Nick Pisano refutes Neil Killick’s assertion that “traditional software development contracts” are the problem.

Strategy and Governance

  • Cornelius Fichtner interviews John Donahoe, SPMO Director at the Star Alliance, on the nature and value provided by the Strategic PMO. Just 24 minutes, safe for work.
  • Kevin Kern on PMO success: “The ultimate [PMO] is a model of defined and aligned processes, with results tracking and transparency to match.”
  • Allen Ruddock observes that a PMO has to be close to the action in order to be effective. Not off-shored, or shared services, but an actual participant!
  • Glen Alleman applies an IT governance and decision rights mindset to the #NoEstimates movement, referencing a book by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross.
  • John Goodpasture notes the difference between a cost and an investment, and between maturity and decline.
  • Rich Maltzman and Dave Shirley trot out statistics that demonstrate strategic alignment has a significant impact on the probability of a successful project.

Podcasts and Videos

  • Cesar Abeid interviews Patrick Snow on growing a passion into business, while keeping your day job. Just 36 minutes, safe for work.
  • Michel Dion adds his comments to that new slice-of-death video, “The Expert.” Less than seven minutes, safe for work, and more depressing than a week’s worth of Dilbert.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of February 17 – 23

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Cherry PickingNew project management articles published on the web during the week of February 17 – 23. We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to! Recommended:

Trends

  • Dr. Harold Kerzner describes PM 2.0 as a replacement for the traditional approach to project management. Meaning, the stuff he’s been writing about for 35 years.
  • Mike Griffiths examines the prospect that virtual teams may be the next revolution in work, by reviewing past revolutions and evolutions.
  • Andrea Brockmeir, Vicki James, Elizabeth Larson, and Richard Larson report on the trends that will affect project managers and business analysts in 2014.
  • Elizabeth Harrin notes four ways in which project management (and work!) has changed significantly in the last ten years.
  • Saritha Rai reports on India’s $75 million Mars orbiter mission. The U.S.A. can’t make a movie about going into space that cheaply!

PM Best Practices

  • Jennifer Lonoff Schiff shares her tips for setting and managing expectations on IT projects.
  • Martin Webster explains how to get your team to the high-performing level. It starts with loyalty.
  • Patti Gilchrist addresses team building when your team is geographically distributed.
  • Steven Levy begins a series on calculating risk. Here’s part two.
  • Geoff Crane demonstrates how to put together a work breakdown structure, using “Saving Private Ryan: The Musical” as an example.
  • John Goodpasture warns that the excitability arising from our calculations should reflect the relative precision of our estimates.
  • John Reiling offers several key factors to consider during the buy-or-build analysis, when outsourcing is under consideration.
  • Marian Haus identifies several potential constraints on the project schedule, and how to address them.

Project Governance

  • Glen Alleman links systems thinking to assessing costs and determining what a project is worth.
  • Michel Dion looks at the governance differences between project-oriented organizations and those where projects run in parallel with routine operations.
  • Mario Trentim continues his series on implementing a PMO.
  • Ashley Smith reports on a survey that found corporate counsel and compliance experts expect the growth of data protection laws to impact their global businesses.

Agile Methods

  • Gil Broza lists his recommendations for preparing your organization to actually be Agile, rather than simply do Agile.
  • Shim Marom reviews a paper by Terry McKenna and Jon Whitty, on why Agile methods are not new, and why Agile is not going to be the last word.
  • Johanna Rothman concludes her series on the cost of delay, parts five and six.
  • Mike Cohn offers some examples of user stories for back-end systems, meaning those without human users.
  • Ritesh Gupta and Sharon Sharma tell how a Scrum team can address discovered value, meaning the requirements “discovered” as development progresses.

Podcasts and Videos

  • Cesar Abeid interviews Stephen Weber from Less Meeting, who tells how to reduce the amount of time we spend on unproductive meetings. Just 44 minutes, safe for work.
  • Dave Prior interviews Agile coach and author Kamal Mangani on transforming large organizations that struggle to use Agile methods. Just 15 minutes, safe for work.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of February 10 – 16

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Lederhosen Newsboy CartoonNew project management articles published on the web during the week of February 10 – 16. We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to! Thanks to Michel Dion at Project Aria for publishing my guest post on planning project human resources management. Recommended:

Trends

  • Zavain Dar invokes Immanuel Kant, to argue that Big Data is helping us move from logical analysis to a search for synthetic truths.
  • Lyndsey Gilpin summarizes ten key things to understand about 3D printing.

PM Best Practices

  • Kevin Korterud wants us to manage the procurement department as both a team member and as a project stakeholder.
  • Tony Adams revisits risk management, not as a list of things to avoid, but as a means to find opportunities we can exploit.
  • David Hillson answers three key questions about risk management in complex projects, and how the strategies of flexibility and resilience can make the difference.
  • John Goodpasture considers an innovative presentation by Glen Alleman as a three-body problem, and asks if there should be four, or even five?
  • Martin Webster notes five early warning signs of ineffective leadership.
  • Anya Faingersh identifies four drivers for schedule delays.

Project Governance

  • Tim Cushing summarizes the appalling state of the TECS upgrade project run by the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies.
  • Chi-Pong Wong identifies the six critical success factors for PMO success.
  • Todd Williams reviews “Strategies for Project Sponsorship,” by Vicki James, Ron Rosenhead, and Peter Taylor.
  • Michel Dion notes that different types of projects have different definitions of success.

Agile Methods

  • Mike Griffiths notes, “Agile processes are an enabler for intelligent action, but not a guarantee of it.”
  • Johanna Rothman continues her series on the cost of delay, with the cost of indecision and the cost of technical debt.
  • Wayne Grant shares three more techniques for keeping retrospectives from getting stale.
  • Vijaya Kumar Bandaru explains Scrum through the metaphor of prescribing and adjusting your medication when sick.

Productivity

  • Joel Bancroft-Connors and Hogarth return from an eight-month absence with a post on [wait for it] … procrastination!
  • Lisa Evans makes the point that the office just might be the worst place to get things done.
  • Alina Vrabie reminds us of the origin of the eight-hour workday, and offers a few alternatives that might let us be more productive.
  • Michael Stanleigh lists twenty stress reducers for project managers.
  • Travis Bradberry explains how successful people stay calm.
  • Anita Bruzzese is on the warpath against bad Email practices.

Podcasts and Videos

  • Elizabeth Harrin tells how to employ a customer satisfaction-centric project management improvement process. Just 18 minutes, safe for work.
  • Cesar Abeid interviews David Sparks on how to tame the Email beast. Just 53 minutes, safe for work.
  • Mark Phillipy interviews Samad Aidane on how to apply neuroscience to understand cultural differences. Just 54 minutes, safe for work.

Enjoy!