Top Project Management Articles of All Time

In case you’ve only just stumbled across this blog, in 2021 I celebrated 15 years of blogging about project management. And we kept on going!

I thought it was time to look back and see what the stand-out articles were over the years. Here are the top articles year by year. There are some common themes and ‘all time greats’ as you’ll see!

2023

The How to Handover a Project article topped the list of most popular reads of the year again this year, closely followed by How to Do Version Control.

I also added articles on how to write handover emails and how to handover a project on closure.

I think blogging has moved beyond ‘what are you doing right now’ and personal updates (we have other social channels for those now) and more into the ‘how do I?’ category of content. I’d like to think of this blog as somewhere people go to get the answers to their tricky questions.

2022

The How to Handover a Project article held it’s top spot, followed by Project Artifacts and How to Use Them.

I’m surprised at this one, but I think people were looking up ‘artifact’ as it’s such an unusual word that we don’t really use in business or project management conversation, unless you’re studying for the PMP exam.

2021

Were people handing over work to others more than normal during 2021? Or perhaps we all took the opportunity to leave the office as soon as we could when restrictions on movement were briefly lifted from time to time?

Either way, my guide to how to handover a project before your holiday holiday was the most-read piece on the site that year. It’s all about how to leave the office without worrying about looking back, because you’ve done a smooth handover to a colleague who can act as a caretaker while you’re off.

2020

We all know what happened during 2020: if you weren’t working virtually already, the pandemic pretty much enforced it for people with office jobs. As a result, my guide to how to run a virtual scavenger hunt to help with team building in remote teams went viral and was by far the most-read article on the site that year.

2019

This year, project managers must have been concerned about meeting minutes as the article that was read the most was all about tips for writing better minutes.

2018

The essential docs article topped the list again this year, closely followed by the resource library pages.

You don’t have access to the resource library? It’s free. It’s part of our customer portal and it contains templates and guides. What are you waiting for?

2017

My summary of the 9 project management documents every project needs came out in the Spring of 2017 (if I remember rightly) and fast became the most popular article that year.

I think it helped that I included links to templates so readers could get started really quickly with creating the documents that were going to have the most impact on their project’s success, without having a huge overhead of bureaucracy.

2016

The most popular article of this year was my guide to the project management conferences happening.

I had no idea that this would be such an important article for people, and it’s something I’ve kept updating year on year. I think it’s good to summarize the largest and best events to help you make decisions about what to spend your money on. There’s a lot of choice, and the list necessarily reflects the ones I feel I can best talk knowledgeably about (i.e. the ones I have been to and experienced the quality first-hand).

If you think I have missed any, drop me a line and let me know what’s happening near you for next year’s version.

2015

This was the year I wrote the definitive guide to project management success criteria. This is probably the most-read article I have ever written, and I’ve tried to expand it over the last 12 months to make it even more useful.

It was also one of my first articles to include a free thing. Right now it’s got a list of  done-for-you 20 sample success criteria so that you don’t have to think them up yourself.

2014

This piece on 10 Killer Interview Questions for Project Managers is probably one of the all-time top articles. It’s been reprinted elsewhere and still gets read today.

Back then I did have responsibility for hiring (I don’t have a PM team working for me today) so I was speaking from my own experiences.

2013

Google Analytics tells me that 6 Things I Didn’t Know About Being a PM was the top post of 2013.

I hadn’t read this one for a while (probably since I first published it) and it was good to look back. I still believe that all this is true.

2012

I hadn’t realized it, but What Makes A Good Project Manager was actually the top post of 2012. I re-ran the article just recently, which shows I still rate it as a good piece of writing too. (I didn’t write it, by the way.)

2011

One of this year’s most-read articles was 5 Project Management Apps You’ve Never Heard Of.

Checking in today with the companies mentioned, three are still going, one looks like it has been taken over by Easy Projects and the last one’s website is no longer working. For more up-to-date software reviews, see my complete list here.

2010

My project alphabet was a popular post of 2010 and inspired Derek Huether to write a book about zombie project management.

(Don’t know what that is? Here’s the scoop on zombie projects and how to kill them).

2009

I declared 2009 the year of the Office Goddess and I wrote a series of posts about how to excel at work.

This was one of my favorites: about Pareto and the 80/20 rule and how some stuff just needs to get done.

That was back in the days before I had brand guidelines for how my blog should look – we’ve updated quite a few things since then!

2008

In 2008 I was living and working in Paris, France, which involved several office moves. I wrote about what every project manager needs as her office survival kit – things that travelled with me from office to office (and not work-related paperwork, either).

By the way, I refer to La Défense as crummy in this article, but by the time I left I had come to appreciate the arch, the architecture and the little cafés hidden between the offices. And also the massive shopping center.

2007

In September 2007 I published a guide to why projects fail. It touched on the classic reasons for project failures – poor sponsorship and so on – but also focused on how we define failure on projects.

It’s still something that I don’t think we spend enough time doing. Key success criteria, and, in contrast, what failure looks like, are still areas of projects where miscommunication leads to unhappy stakeholders, even if you deliver what you said you would.

2006

I reported on the state of the Gypsy Moth IV project: the restoration of a historic yacht. At the time, the project was desperately short of cash.

Gipsy Moth IV did make her planned round-the-world journey and continues to operate today, taking groups on breath-taking sea journeys.

Here’s to the next 15 years!

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