Tag Archives: PMO

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!

New PM Articles for the Week of June 3 – 9

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of June 3 – 9. And this week’s video: Mike Clayton shares six actions and behaviors that will significantly improve your project outcomes. Not just for project management; much of this stuff is valuable for all aspects of your life. Under 4 minutes, safe for work.

Pictures this week from our short camping trip to Pacific City, Oregon.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Greg Satell explains the evolution from corporate strategies based on value chains to those based on ecosystems. 5 minutes to read.
  • James Vincent and Chaim Gartenburg report on Amazon’s new Prime Air delivery drone, expected to begin delivering packages “within months.” If you work for a retail or logistics organization, your business model will need an update. 3 minutes to read.
  • John Detrixhe summarizes a draft communique from the G20 finance ministers that will make it harder for global tech firms to avoid corporate income taxes. 2 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Gina Abudi tells us how to pitch our ideas for projects to the executives who “hold the purse.” 2 minutes to read.
  • Kiron Bondale revisits some old proverbs to find wisdom for today. 2 minutes to read.
  • John Goodpasture shares some rules of thumb that can help us estimate (or analyze an estimate) in the absence of statistical data. Just over a minute to read.
  • Francesco Marcatto reminds us that, while no two projects are alike, some roadblocks come up more frequently than others. 5 minutes to read.
  • Laura Barnard introduces her PMO Strategies podcast, from her background to the Project Management Day of Service to what she hopes listeners will take away from future podcasts. 15 minutes, safe for work.
  • Elizabeth Harrin explores the value proposition of a project dashboard when managing several projects at once. 8 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly collection of Agile content, from Amazon Agility to DevOps as a strategic advantage to dates for product road maps. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Sidharth Malhotra explains the concept of micro-services using a metaphor based on an ice cream shop—call it the Dairy Queen architecture. 7 minutes to read.
  • Henny Portman reviews Jeff Patton’s classic, User Story Mapping. As usual, he summarizes all 18 chapters in two or three sentences, each. 4 minutes to read.
  • Tom Cagely admits that story points aren’t horrible, under certain circumstances, and then goes on to explain when they make sense. Each a little over 2 minutes.
  • Jan Jaap Cannegieter and Han Niessing describe two cases that illustrate the evolution from testing lead to test assurance officer and test coach. 6 minutes to read.
  • Ashley Bey does a deep dive on unit testing the parts of your system that interact with the outside world. Warning: high geek-level content! 9 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Richard Straub opines on the need for new management approaches and behaviors in an era of ecosystems. 4 minutes to read.
  • Suzanne Lucas explains edge collaboration, an organizational approach for making knowledge sharing across departments more efficient. 3 minutes to read.
  • Alex Circei explains why discipline is so important when leading engineers. Note: discipline is not externally imposed, and it certainly isn’t punishment. 4 minutes to read.

Research and Insights

  • Shelly Fan summarizes new research into brain-machine interface technology, funded by DARPA. You know: the people who funded the invention of the internet. 6 minutes to read.
  • Kayla Matthews reports on five research projects targeting defenses against cyber-attacks. 5 minutes to read.
  • Martin Giles assess the recent incidents of cyber security flaws found in semiconductor chips reported by outside researchers and finds that they take too long to fix them. 5 minutes to read.
  • Akash Deep lists a few steps to take to prevent spear phishing, the most successful technique used by cyber criminals to do their dirty work. 5 minutes to read.

Working and the Workplace

  • Melody Wilding coaches us on how to control our emotions at work (or anyplace else). 3 minutes to read.
  • Leon Straker presents his assessment of different sitting postures for different types of tasks, with the goal of reducing back pain. 4 minutes to read.
  • Alyse Kalish has collected 22 team-building activities that don’t suck. Well, most of them don’t. 11 minutes to read.

Enjoy!