“Is the entrance that way, love?” said the delivery man as I was walking past a local school. I replied that it was. I didn’t have the children with me at the time but I must have looked like a harried mother who would know how to get to the school. When I got home…
Is your summer stretching ahead with one cocktail networking event after another? No? Mine neither. However, there is always some kind of requirement to met new people as a project manager, even if it’s just your next project team. And as author Will Kintish says, networking is simply about building relationships. I asked him for…
Which one of these is the odd one out? “Where is the TV remote control?” “Where are all the drink mats?” “Where is Oliver’s lion?” “Where is my library ticket?” The thing they have in common is… they are all on the floor, except the TV remote control which is under the sofa. This is…
I thought I had to be organised with one baby, now I have two it is completely different. There’s a lot to think about, from planning toddler meals and feeding the rest of the family to a near-military operation just to leave the house. Last night after putting Oliver down I opened a brand new…
“A perfect project plan for regular, light-touch steering should contain no more than five milestones,” writes Graham Allcott in his book, How To Be A Productivity Ninja. “Too often, milestones become micro-management or seem to provide complication and confusion rather than clarity. So in each of your projects, you should look for between one and…
Project management tools come in many shapes and flavours, and most of what I review is software designed to manage small and medium-sized projects. Primavera, on the other hand, is an enterprise-grade software solution aimed at companies with a mature approach to project management probably with a programme or portfolio management approach in hand too….
On 5 February we celebrated Jack’s first birthday. He was most excited by the gift of a push-along car, although it took him a couple of days to work out how to press the small button to get the music to play. Currently he’s lifting up the seat, putting plastic bricks in the recess under…
Collaboration tools have a number of benefits, and enhanced communication with stakeholders is top of the list. You can use your communications strategy to identify and map stakeholders. Your chosen tools enable the project team to engage with stakeholders in a way that suits their preferences, and many people today have shifted the way they…
I gave a presentation on social media for project managers at the PMI Learning, Education and Development Community of Practice at the end of last year. They run a successful online book club and they were discussing my book on the subject, so it was great to be asked to go along and round out…
It’s approaching 6am and I’ve just got Jack off to sleep again. Going against our own routine and the received wisdom about baby sleep, I let him sleep on me. After all, he has a cold. And I can’t keep lifting him in and out of the cot because I’ve got backache. The backache is…
Social communications form a large part of life outside the office, and the connected project manager needs to incorporate those ways of out-of-the-office communications into working practices today. Many stakeholders already use publicly available, consumer-led social communication tools to manage their personal networks. In our drive to be easy to do business with, it is…
This is a guest post by Lee Carnihan. After more than ten years working in digital I’ve met a dozen or so female project managers but only two female web developers. Yes, two. I can still remember their names. Laura and Tanya. My anecdotal experience, sadly, seems to confirm the statistical reality that women in…