Tag Archives: PMO

New PM Articles for the Week of November 4 – 10

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 4 – 10. And this week’s video: Mike Clayton tells us why we should aspire to boring projects. Not boring outcomes, but the kind where that which is planned and predicted actually comes to pass, without heroic interventions, all-night problem resolution, or Costco-sized containers of antacids. 4 minutes, safe for work.

Ethics, Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Sean Fleming notes a key finding from PwC’s report, Talent Trends 2019: CEO’s are deeply worried about the availability of skilled workers. 2 minutes to read.
  • Mutale Nkonde considers the question: is addressing any bias displayed by AI applications a matter of corporate social responsibility? 4 minutes to read.
  • Robin Pomeroy poses the ethical questions arising from a new movie starring an actor who has been dead since 1955—James Dean. When do Deepfakes become unethical? 3 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Elizabeth Harrin celebrates International Project Management Day 2019 by focusing on what matters most: your well-being, morale, and mental health. 4 minutes to read.
  • Harry Hall explains how to facilitate the nominal group technique, a powerful tool for helping a small group reach consensus. 2 minutes to read.
  • Praveen Malik explains how to use resource leveling and resource smoothing to create a workable project schedule. 4 minutes to read.
  • Elise Stevens interviews Vicki Griffiths, Chair of the APM Women in Project Management SIG. More than 600 people attended their annual conference in September. Podcast, 24 minutes, safe for work.
  • John Goodpasture explains loose coupling and tight coupling, and how to minimize the effect of tight coupling on project timelines. 2 minutes to read.
  • Andy Jordan applies the Hippocratic maxim—“First, do no harm”—to the PMO. 7 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from agile playbooks to team contracts and alignment maps to product review in dual-tack agile. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Marcus Blankenship interviews Esther Derby on her new book, Seven Rules for Positive Productive Change. Podcast, 32 minutes, safe for work. Also includes a transcript.
  • Vadym Muraviov describes the structure and hierarchy of user stories, epics, and themes. 3 minutes to read.
  • Jose Casal expounds of the use of flow efficiency in process improvement. 8 minutes to read.
  • Vadim recommends five books, ostensibly for product managers, but applicable to everyone tasked with influencing others. 3 minutes to read.
  • Mike Griffiths shares another extract from his new book, Agile Illustrated: A visual learner’s guide to agility. This section explains the Declaration of Interdependence. 3 minutes to read.
  • Johanna Rothman posted a series on how to create a proposal for a conference presentation. Here is part 2 and part 3. About 17 minutes to read all three parts.

Applied Leadership

  • Karolina Tóth interviews Dan Rummel, Senior Director of Engineering at One Medical, on establishing a foundation of psychological safety. Podcast, 21 minutes, safe for work.
  • Jory MacKay compiled several ways to give and receive negative feedback but begins with the elephant in the room: how we feel about it. 11 minutes to read.
  • Kat Boogaard presents survey results: six ways to make your team more effective. 6 minutes to read.

Cybersecurity and Data Protection

  • Marc Barrachin and Algirde Pipikaite make the case for a global standard for reporting cyberattacks. To fight these crimes, they must be reported. 4 minutes to read.
  • Joan Goodchild interviews Marcy Klipfel on the benefits of a collaboration between IT and HR in setting and training security policies. 3 minutes to read.
  • Justin Rohrlich reports that the Department of Homeland Security will soon have biometric data on nearly 260 million people. This is not good news. 4 minutes to read.

Pot Pourri

  • Emily Stone collected insights from several Kellogg School of Management professors on preparing for career opportunities. 6 minutes to read.
  • Selin Kesebir and colleagues found that men and women have significantly different attitudes toward competition. 4 minutes to read.
  • Amy Irwin collated insights from mental health professionals on how to cope with rudeness in the workplace. 4 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of September 9 – 15

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of September 9 – 15. And this week’s video: Jon Acampora tutors us on using the VLOOKUP function in Excel. Jon provides a sample file that you can download and use to follow along. One of the best Excel tutorials I’ve ever seen, for one of the most useful (and widely used) spreadsheet functions. 22 minutes, safe for work.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Greg Satell explains why change management so often fails. Don’t prepare for battle by crafting a sales pitch! 5 minutes to read.
  • Mike Clayton reviews Positive Psychology in Business, by Sarah Lewis. 3 minutes to read. He even includes a video with more details—6 minutes, safe for work.
  • The nice folks at Clarizen point out that Brexit will also upend UK employment law, from precedent to current cases to legislation needed to replace EU law. 3 minutes to read.
  • Suzanne Lucas reports on California legislation that may reclassify gig workers as employees. Not just Uber—software companies need to pay attention! 3 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Kiron Bondale points out some of the underlying causes of ineffective project risk management. 2 minutes to read.
  • Elizabeth Harrin tells us how to hold a brilliant project kick-off meeting. My project’s so bright, I gotta wear shades. 10 minutes to read.
  • Cornelius Fichtner interviews PMI Head of Certification Products Sierra Hampton-Simmons on the coming changes to the PMP exam, as of July 1, 2020. Podcast, 30 minutes, safe for work.
  • Marina Pilipenko briefly summarizes six common techniques for making project estimates. 4 minutes to read.
  • Emmie Anderson shares her infographic on Zombie PMOs, showing symptoms and effective treatments. Good information, overused metaphor. 3 minutes to read.
  • Peter Taylor celebrates the 10th anniversary of publishing The Lazy Project Manager by making the Kindle version available for free. 178 pages. And: Laura Barnard interviews Peter on business agility and the PMO. Podcast, 40 minutes, safe for work.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of agile content, from internalizing design thinking to the meaning of ‘bugs’ in an agile context to idea validation. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Mike Cohn explains why the Fibonacci sequence works so well with Planning Poker. 4 minutes to read.
  • Johanna Rothman responds to a reader comment on last week’s post: measuring both cycle time and velocity lets a team try to beat a goal. Can opener, meet worms! 4 minutes to read.
  • Nilanjan Bhattacharya points out some of the problems we should anticipate when integrating infrastructure as code (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) into DevOps. 5 minutes to read.
  • Alister Scott describes the evolution of his team’s Agile story wall, from a Kanban board to a timeline to something even more detailed. 3 minutes to read.
  • John Cutler shares an agenda that will guide your team toward an actionable definition of a Minimum Viable Product. No, really. 4 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Sharlyn Lauby identifies five different roles you want on your team, and why you want each of them—even the Naysayer. 3 minutes to read.
  • Frank Sonnenberg contemplates the value of credibility and explains how to earn 3 minutes to read.
  • François Ortalo-Magné, Dean of the London Business School, recommends three self-development actions for leaders to be more effective. 3 minutes to read.

Cybersecurity and Data Protection

  • Daniel Dobrygowski reports on the growth of corporate cybersecurity alliances. 6 minutes to read.
  • Emam explains the details of the Deep Fake Detection Challenge, intended to create a realistic dataset that can be used to train AI models. 2 minutes to read.
  • Joan Goodchild updates us on the latest phishing and spear-phishing attack vectors. Email is an open window, even if you lock all the doors. 5 minutes to read.

Pot Pourri

  • Nancy Settle-Murphy examines ghosting—”the practice of ignoring or severing a business relationship by suddenly withdrawing from all communication.” 6 minutes to read.
  • Martha Jeong summarizes research into how leaders are perceived when they change their minds. 4 minutes to read.
  • Charlotte Jee reports that Amazon is now soliciting answers for questions that Alexa can’t handle from the general public. This could get ugly. 2 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of June 17 – 23

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of June 17 – 23. And this week’s video: digital project managers Ben Aston and Kelly Suter discuss the Hertz-Accenture lawsuit. $32USD million for a website design that never went live? That requires a lot of process failures! 7 minutes, safe for work (unless you believe cock-up is a bad word).

This week’s images from our day trip to Death Valley.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Karl Henrik Smith analyzes Anthos, Google’s new Kubernetes-based platform designed to manage applications across multiple clouds, such as AWS and Azure. 8 minutes to read.
  • Greg Satell examines how major changes in technology, resource utilization, migration, and demographics drove change in the 20th century and projects what these trends will mean in this century. 6 minutes to read.
  • Eshe Nelson interviews Richard Baldwin, author of The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, robotics, and the future of work. 8 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Mike Griffiths has been named co-lead for the next update cycle of the PMBOK, to be called the 7th Expect “a radical departure from all previous editions.” Just a minute to read.
  • Glen Alleman defines technical margin and contingency and explains how they are used in systems under development. 2 minutes to read.
  • Dale Howard tells us how to view all predecessors and successors for any task in MS Project. Very useful in highly detailed plans! 3 minutes to read.
  • The nice folks at Clarizen tell about RACI charts—what they are, how they are used, and why we need them. 3 minutes to read.
  • Tom Cagely presents the positive case for a Big Bang implementation of a major change, like moving to a new ERP. 3 minutes to read.
  • Jim Conroy describes five specific actions that the PMO can initiate in order to improve project benefits realization. 4 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from decision making in flat organizations to customer centricity to killing any project. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • James Thomas led a 15-minute discussion on the value of testing is … and captured the group learnings in a mind map. 3 minutes to read, including the map.
  • Dave West makes a good case for putting product customer personas on the team wall. 4 minutes to read.
  • Steven Hansen talks us through conducting an estimate for a project with an embedded Linux component. This is illustrative of good practice in technical analysis, from alternatives to risks. 5 minutes to read.
  • Johanna Rothman reminds us to clean our backlogs, create a parking lot, and otherwise reduce our cognitive load. 3 minutes to read.
  • Marija Cvjetkovic shares 15 of her cartoons, mocking “false Scrum implementations.” 3 minutes to read; no estimate for time required to laugh nervously and change the subject.

Applied Leadership

  • Kumar Srikant leads us on a deep examination of professional and business ethics violations and how we choose to cheat. 6 minutes to read.
  • Nick Walker and Bill Yates interview Dr. Ruth Middleton-House on decision-making under threatening conditions. Podcast, 35 minutes, safe for work.
  • Vikash Kumar shares his principles for leading a geographically distributed team. 5 minutes to read.

Research and Insights

  • Andrej Kovačević updates us on Dark Web activities that appear to be trending, with implications for the business world. 4 minutes to read.
  • Edward Hawkins gives us some insight into how internal and external security testing is accomplished. 5 minutes to read.
  • Dan Schawbel reports on research that indicates a generation preference (or aversion) for open offices. Having both kinds of space might provide an edge in the talent war. 3 minutes to read.
  • John Detrixhe reports that new financial technology algorithms discriminate against minorities 40% less often than human lenders. 3 minutes to read.

Working and the Workplace

  • Tim O’Brien reminds us that we should not let our role become our identity, and let professional reverses hurt us on a personal level. 5 minutes to read.
  • John Leo Weber coaches us on office etiquette—the little rules that help us fit into the workplace. Yes, this is even more important for leaders. 6 minutes to read.
  • Dan Matthews suggests simple in loco parentis solutions for three common office conflicts. 2 minutes to read.

Enjoy!