Tag Archives: PMO

New PM Articles for the Week of January 28 – February 3

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of January 28 – February 3. And this week’s video: Adriana Girdler coaches us on facilitating a meeting. Focused on the first-timers but still worth a look even if you’ve been facilitating for years. 6 minutes, safe for work.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Mark McNamee and Athanasia Kokkinogeni observe, “In the eyes of businesses, the UK has come to resemble an emerging market.” Brexit is driving volatility. 6 minutes to read.
  • Steve Blank explains why McKinsey’s Three Horizons model for managing and budgeting for innovation and research is no longer applicable. 4 minutes to read.
  • Joel Manner explores Eric Schmidt’s prediction that the internet is dividing into three politically-defined regions: US-led, China-led, and EU-led. 9 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Sylvia Moses describes the X-shaped skills of a highly capable project manager. 10 minutes to read.
  • Mike Griffiths covers the what, how, and why of project charters. 11 minutes to read.
  • Mike Clayton gives us a deep tutorial on project scheduling, from defining and sequencing activities through estimating durations and developing a schedule. 12 minutes to read.
  • John Goodpasture shares his slide presentation on preparing a request for proposal. 4 minutes to read, plus the slides.
  • Cornelius Fichtner interviews Douglas Knutzen on leveraging scheduling, execution, and team techniques to increase speed on your projects. Podcast, 20 minutes, safe for work.
  • Dave Prior interviews Jesse Fewell on the evolving role of the PMO in an agile organization. Podcast, 36 minutes, safe for work.
  • Jan Schiller recaps twelve habits that she has observed in successful project portfolio managers. 3 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from Scrum limits to exemplary agile to the Scrum Master Trends Report 2019. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Mike Cohn makes it clear why software development teams have learned to focus on being done rather than estimating progress. 3 minutes to read.
  • Dave West points out the key nuggets in the 2019 Scrum mater Trends Report. 4 minutes to read.
  • Nandhini Saravanan explains the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling of databases and what each approach is useful for. 5 minutes to read.
  • Fio Dossetto extols the virtues of a heat map in analyzing the effectiveness of a user interface design. 6 minutes to read.
  • Joep Schuurkes tells us why we should have a test strategy and what it should cover. 3 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Simone Stolzoff tells how engineer Satya Nadella turned Microsoft, “From a culture of know-it-alls to a culture of learn-it-alls.” 9 minutes to read.
  • Lisette Sutherland interviews Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier—a 100% remote company with over 200 people—on the future of work. Podcast, 38 minutes, safe for work.
  • Leigh Espy sells us on problem-solving skills as a key part of career development. 3 minutes to read.

Research and Insights

  • Greg Satell sees inflection points in energy, synthetic biology, and computation that are about to dramatically transform society. 5 minutes to read.
  • Karen Hao updates us on facial recognition software. Accuracy is improving for women and minorities, but the potential for abuse still exists. 4 minutes to read.
  • Roamy suggests a low-tech alternative to a creepy RFID implant under the skin or an easily-lost card. It’s obvious, once you read it. 4 minutes to read.

Working and the Workplace

  • Andy Silber advocates for Inbox Zero. 4 minutes to read.
  • Corrine Purtill reports on one of the key messages at the Davos conference: the four-day work week. 2 minutes to read.
  • Alex Reardon argues that when we’re sick, we should take an actual sick day—not just work from home. 3 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of January 21 – 27

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of January 21 – 27. And this week’s video: Mike Clayton explains IT service management (ITSM) and how the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) framework helps to structure efficient creation, delivery, and maintenance of services. As Mike says, some understanding of ITSM is valuable for the practicing IT project manager. 8 minutes, safe for work.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist for the IMF, provides an executive summary of their forecast for reduced growth in the global economy. 4 minutes to read.
  • Heather Landy reports from Davos, where a survey of CEO’s from every region concurs with the IMF assessment—growth will slow in 2019. 2 minutes to read.
  • Hemant Taneja says that the era of move fast and break things is over. We should define MVP to be minimum virtuous product. 8 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Elise Stevens interviews Julia Steel on getting buy-in from stakeholders. Podcast 22 minutes, safe for work.
  • Lindsay Curtis lists seven productive practices for change management. 4 minutes to read.
  • Leigh Espy tutors us on business process mapping. 6 minutes to read.
  • John Goodpasture reminds us to only measure the measurable. Just a minute to read.
  • Hayley Eubanks extracts two sections from a whitepaper by Jerry Manas on product portfolio management. 4 minutes to read.
  • Stuart Easton notes that since some estimates indicate that over 50% of projects fail, it can’t all be a failure of execution. 7 minutes to read.
  • Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy lists the five most popular articles posted on PM Basics 101 during 2018. In case you missed some of them. 2 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from personality traits suitable for Agile teams to psychological safety to determining product value. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Kiron Bondale describes the Definition of Ready, a complement to the Definition of Done, in the context of the Scrum ceremonies. 2 minutes to read.
  • Nikolay Tsonev points out six mistakes to avoid when using Lean principles to manage a project. 5 minutes to read.
  • Henny Portman reviews The Professional Product Owner, by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham. 4 minutes to read.
  • Rosalia Baé argues that the key to enhancing software quality is design thinking. 6 minutes to read.
  • Lou Rosenfeld interviews product design process influencer Rich Mironov on managing multiple points of view. Podcast, 21 minutes, safe for work.

Applied Leadership

  • Grand CanyonArt Petty reminds us that the big decisions are almost always clouded in ambiguity; consensus is elusive, and the decision maker has to embrace the moment. 4 minutes to read.
  • Elizabeth Harrin coaches us on how to be a mentor (which is not the same thing as a coach). 4 minutes to read.
  • Curt Nickisch interviews Amy Edmondson, author of the seminal paper, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams and a new book. Podcast, 27 minutes, safe for work.

Research and Insights

  • Mike Murphy predicts that 2019 will be the year of foldable Android phones. Are we willing to pay more for a larger screen that fits in a pocket? 3 minutes to read.
  • Elias Groll interviews the legendary Jon Callas, who left his job as one of Apple’s senior security specialists for the ACLU so he could influence the public policy debate. 10 minutes to read.
  • Karen Hao reports on a new way to make algorithms behave in a more ethical manner: give them a sense of the uncertainty that humans experience in decision making. 4 minutes to read.

Working and the Workplace

  • Helen Anderson tells us how she has been dealing with imposter syndrome and job-related stress. “You don’t have to know everything about everything.” 3 minutes to read.
  • Kayla Matthews lists nine time management techniques for remote workers. 4 minutes to read.
  • Suzanne Lucas advises us that some Glassdoor reviews are fake—the horror! But there are ways to spot them. 3 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of January 7 – 13

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of January 7 – 13. And this week’s video: Microsoft program manager Verlebie Chan talks about overcoming bias, expectations, and self-doubt and taking risks on her way to establishing her career as a software developer. 13 minutes to watch.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Mike Murphy reports from the Consumer Electronics Show 2019. “We’ve entered the post-smartphone era.” 8 minutes to read.
  • The folks at ELIX list the core business values of Amazon, as articulated and evolved by Jeff Bezos. 8 minutes to read.
  • Paul Rawlinson makes an elegant case for regulation as necessary to keep global trade from becoming a zero-sum game. 3 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Mike Clayton recaps ten lessons he’s learned about project management over the years. Best line: “Stakeholder Engagement is Project Management for Sophisticated Adults.”8 minutes to read.
  • The folks at PM Times join forces to point out trends in project management, business analysis, and agile methods during 2019. 6 minutes to read.
  • Carolyn Smith shares lessons learned from two decades managing IT PMO organizations. 14 minutes to read but well worth it.
  • Leigh Espy tutors us on affinity diagrams—what they are and how to use them. 6 minutes to read.
  • Sandhya Gupta shares her checklist for sunsetting software products, from the vendor’s point of view. 7 minutes to read.
  • Elise Stevens interviews Susanne Madsen on managing stress while managing projects. Podcast, 34 minutes, safe for work.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his list of Agile content, from the EPIQ model to product design principles to the Prime Directive. 7 outbound links, three minutes to read.
  • John Demian gets deep into the economics of a serverless (in this case AWS Lambda) framework for operations. 12 minutes to read.
  • Vladimir Fedak makes the argument against a switch to microservices. 4 minutes to read.
  • Scott Shipp wants to put the “engineering” back in software engineering. Hear, hear! 5 minutes to read.
  • Henny Portman name checks Agile frameworks, from well-known to obscure and a couple that I don’t think count as Agile frameworks. 12 minutes to read.
  • Kristin Jackvony explains how the Automation Test Wheel, an alternative concept to the testing pyramid that she described here, works in practice. 5 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Randy Conley gets a few leadership lessons from observing nature in action: one hawk and three crows. 5 minutes to read.
  • Mary Jo Asmus helps reflexive problem-solvers keep the problems with their owners with one simple question. 2 minutes to read.
  • Steve Keating explains the difference between a talker and a communicator. I’ll let you describe the transmitter. Here’s part 2. Each about 3 minutes to read.

Research and Insights

  • Marc Prosser asks whether facial recognition technology is still viable, now that 3D printed busts of people’s heads have been used to unlock 4 of 5 smartphones. 4 minutes to read.
  • Bill Gates, the world’s second-richest man, reports from a Harvard University lab on new robots shaped like nothing Isaac Asimov ever imagined. 4 minutes to read.
  • David Stringer and Kevin Buckland report on progress in getting to commercially viable solid-state battery technology, the key to faster charging. 6 minutes to read.
  • Paramita Ghosh explains the decentralized data storage approach commonly known as blockchain and points out a few good use cases. 5 minutes to read.

Working and the Workplace.

  • Steph Smith curated a list of ten 2019 conferences for women in technology and on the way identified a couple of diversity scholarships. 6 minutes to read.
  • Alessandro Lulian makes the business case for hiring Millennials. For one thing, they outnumber us Boomers in the workforce. 4 minutes to read.
  • Brian Wallace shares an infographic explaining how to robot-proof your career, in case you’re asking for a friend. 3 minutes or so to read.

Enjoy!