Tag Archives: Project Planning

New PM Articles for the Week of November 18 – 24

Posted on by
Reply

New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 18 – 24. And this week’s video: a short video explaining the notion of thinking fast and slow, as described by Daniel Kahneman in his book of the same name. Highly recommended, if you haven’t read it. 5 minutes, safe for work.

Ethics, Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Greg Satell warns against relying on surveys and statistics to develop business strategy. “Assume that [your strategy] is wrong in at least some aspects.” 5 minutes to read.
  • Alexandra Ossola notes the various biases and intellectual limitations that make humans so bad at predicting the future and then briefly suggests ways around them. 5 minutes to read.
  • Eddie Yoon and colleagues explain the difference between a First Mover and a Category Creator. It’s all about flywheels. 5 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Elizabeth Harrin arms us with a meeting agenda template, ten tips, and two infographics to help prepare for that next project meeting. 6 minutes to read.
  • Mike Clayton talks us into pursuing certification of our project management skills and experience and gives us some tips on how to proceed. Video, 10 minutes, safe for work.
  • Hannah Cohen gives us an advanced tutorial on creating a project timeline. 8 minutes to read.
  • Geert-Hinke Addink describes the pre-mortem and the role it can play in identifying many of the risks in a proposal or new initiative. 2 minutes to read.
  • Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy compares the project manager career path with the Scrum master career path. 10 minutes to read, plus two short videos, 9 and 7 minutes, safe for work.
  • Jaclyn Westlake shows how to write a great project manager resume, including an example. 8 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from tough conversations and conflict to “stances” of the product owner role to the benefits of transparency. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Johannes Geske explains whether you should attend the Professional Scrum Foundations course or the Professional Scrum Master course.
  • Angie Jones analyzed which programming languages are most commonly used for UI test automation. 3 minutes to read.
  • John Yorke shares his slide deck from the Agile Product Ownership meetup for a discussion of the discovery phase of a product. 13 slides, including intro and outro.
  • Vadim lists ten things to keep in mind when developing and maintaining a product road map. 6 minutes to read.
  • Salomé Mortazavi describes outcome-based product roadmaps, driven by a vision and a strategy for achieving it. 5 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Quint Studer suggests a number of specific actions to take that will make it OK for your team to speak the truth to power and take risks of honesty. 7 minutes to read.
  • Art Petty extols the combination of emotional intelligence and situational awareness and offers some thoughts on strengthening your SA skills. 4 minutes to read.
  • Johanna Rothman notes that a major component of culture is what behaviors we choose to reward and punish. 3 minutes to read.

Cybersecurity and Data Protection

  • Richard LeCount gives us the whys and wherefores of an internal cyber security audit. 9minutes to read.
  • Adrien Ogée and Parker Crockford update us on the growing trend of using authentication alternatives to passwords. 4 minutes to read.
  • Alex Humphrey encourages embedding better security practices throughout the DevOps cycle. 4 minutes to read.
  • Brian Wallace shows the history of spam and phishing via timeline. This goes back further than you think. 7 minutes to read.

Pot Pourri

  • Leigh Espy describes several activities that will boost your creative thinking skills. 11 minutes to read.
  • Deepak Vohra reminds us that raw data must be rationalized before it can be analyzed. 3 minutes to read.
  • Rob Marvin points out some of the tech innovations of the closing decade that were so successful, we can’t remember life before them. 13 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of October 28 – November 3

Posted on by

New project management articles published on the web during the week of October 28 – November 3. And this week’s video: Leila Gharani shows us how to SUM, AVERAGE, and COUNT values in a dataset using multiple conditions, without using filters. Excel is no substitute for a database, but the ability to perform a complex analysis on project data, such as Risk and Issue logs, transactions, and estimates without database access or SQL knowledge is invaluable. 14 minutes, safe for work.

This year, Halloween was princess-free. I asked one girl, about 4 years old, if she was a princess. “I’m an Evil Queen,” she replied. Strong female characters, indeed!

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Joe Nocera examines the growing anti-trust “awakening” being powered by criticisms of the Big Tech companies. 7 minutes to read.
  • Dan Kofp reports on research into which consumers benefit the most from ecommerce. Note that “benefit from” and “participate in” are not congruent. 3 minutes to read.
  • Bivás Biswas tutors us on Cloud computing, from the basics to business benefits to the current market and beyond. 10 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Mike Clayton maps out the many steps in the project planning process. Even if you’re an old hand, this will help you decide what elements to emphasize in your next project. 10 minutes to read.
  • Jared Spataro announces the rollout of the newest version of Microsoft Project, along with a new subscription plan. 4 minutes to read.
  • Francesco Marcatto tells us how to communicate project status to clients and stakeholders. 3 minutes to read.
  • Sarah M. Hoban describes a process for storyboarding a report. 3 minutes to read or 5 minutes for the podcast, safe for work.
  • The nice folks at Clarizen point out the benefits of keeping project stakeholders engaged. 2 minutes to read.
  • Leigh Espy catalogs the ten essential project management skills needed for project and career success. 6 minutes to read.
  • Ronald Smith recaps the history of project management, from ancient Egypt through the 20th century to modern software development practices. Great background for presentations. 7 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of agile content, from product-market fit to value-based agreements to the vision driving WeChat. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Gábor Zöld curates his monthly slate of engineering management content, from scaling developer teams to engineering podcasts to career development. 10 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • MostlyJason tells us why and how to use staging environments on the journey to production. 7 minutes to read.
  • Victoria Bezsmolna contrasts mobile app testing with web app testing. The differences are huge. 5 minutes to read.
  • Mike Cohn suggests job stories as a viable alternative to user stories. 7 minutes to read.
  • Michaela Greiler warns us: don’t teach during code reviews. 5 minutes to read.

Applied Leadership

  • Art Petty recommends a non-traditional way to help your team succeed—get out of their way. 2 minutes to read.
  • Aarron Walter shares insights from Julie Zhuo, who rose from intern to VP of Product Design at Facebook, on how to manage a team. 11 minutes to read.
  • In the spirit of Halloween, Suzanne Lucas describes ten monstrous management styles. 3 minutes to read.

Cybersecurity and Data Protection

  • Roland Yegorov scares the Hell out of us with cyber-crime statistics, links to studies and reports, and a video of a woman hijacking an Email account by making a phone call. 5 minutes to read, 3 for the video.
  • Patrick Howell O’Neill reports that WhatsApp is suing Israeli hacking firm NSO Group, accusing them of inserting surveillance malware on targeted user phones. 2 minutes to read.
  • Yash Rathi contrasts the two most influential data privacy laws: the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. 4 minutes to read.

Pot Pourri

  • Stephanie Russell presents research that indicates remote work is more stressful than working at the office. 4 minutes to read.
  • Bill Gates shares the lesson he learned from visiting Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers used a rudimentary wind tunnel to test their airplane models. 6 minutes to read.
  • Greg Satell notes that artificial intelligence is forcing us to answer some very difficult questions about what behaviors must be considered human. 5 minutes to read.

Enjoy!

New PM Articles for the Week of October 7 – 13

Posted on by

New project management articles published on the web during the week of October 7 – 13. And this week’s video: Mike Clayton gives us some tips for better project communication, which is 80% of project management. 11 minutes, safe for work.

Business Acumen and Strategy

  • Steve Blank explains why most companies and government agencies engage in innovation theater, rather than actual innovation. 5 minutes to read.
  • Greg Satell analyzes the rapid stock price collapse of WeWork, a real estate firm incorrectly and unreasonably valued like a software firm. 5 minutes to read.
  • Amber Lee Dennis summarizes Evan Terry’s presentation on current trends in enterprise analytics. 7 minutes to read.

Managing Projects

  • Nehal Padia looks at global system rollouts, from who and why to implementation approaches and methods. And yet only 3 minutes to read!
  • Cornelius Fichtner talks with Susanne Madsen about the second edition of her book, The Power of Project Leadership. Video, 44 minutes, safe for work.
  • Mike Glen walks us through a manufacturing process example to illustrate how network analysis takes us from a list of tasks to an actionable work plan. 7 minutes to read.
  • Henny Portman recounts the origin of an article he wrote with Marisa Silva describing project “creatures” (such as the Pufferfish project). 2 minutes to read, plus 12 minutes for the article.
  • Glen Alleman defines capabilities-based project planning and explains why it’s so valuable. 6 minutes to read.

Managing Software Development

  • Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly list of Agile content, from liberating structures to Swedish-style agile leadership to pair coaching. 7 outbound links, 3 minutes to read.
  • Gábor Zöld curates his monthly engineering management roundup for October 2019. 11 outbound links, 4 minutes to read.
  • Gil Zilberfeld concludes his short series (part 1 here) on why the technical debt metaphor isn’t useful as a metric. 4 minutes to read both parts.
  • Johanna Rothman points out possible sources of extra work in an iteration, and a few strategies for managing it. 4 minutes to read.
  • Jay Geethan makes the case for microservices, as an alternative to monolithic mountains of code. When you say it that way … 2 minutes to read.
  • Victoria Bezsmolna briefly describes seven great continuous integration tools for DevOps. 6 minutes to read.
  • Dave Prior interviews Scott Ambler on PMI’s acquisition of Disciplined Agile. Yes, this is a big deal. Podcast, 34 minutes, safe for work.

Applied Leadership

  • Nancy Settle-Murphy illustrates the need for shared principles between service provider and client and how to arrive at them. 6 minutes to read.
  • Matt Plummer presents a short guide to building our team’s critical thinking skills based on the Critical Thinking Roadmap. 5 minutes to read.

Cybersecurity and Data Protection

  • Gene Marks briefs us on the three attack vectors being used to defeat multi-factor authentication. 3 minutes to read.
  • Curtis Franklin explains four attacks on network infrastructure, using techniques known as “poisoning.” 6 minutes to read.
  • Neha Malhotra shares some effective ways to promote cybersecurity in your organization. 3 minutes to read.

Pot Pourri

  • Elizabeth Harrin shares ten tips for giving a presentation, from preparation to delivery. 8 minutes to read.
  • Sarah M. Hoban recommends that we write a personal mission statement, based on Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” 3 minutes to read; 5 minutes for the podcast, safe for work.
  • Nigel Warburton suggests that in order to make laziness work, we have to put some effort into it. 5 minutes to read.

Enjoy!