Author: Elizabeth Harrin

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years. Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects.
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Use your experts

The best thing about going to the hairdressers is having someone wash my hair. The second best thing is being able to sit there for an hour and be lost in my thoughts while someone makes me beautiful. I don’t talk to my hairdresser about holidays or work, and we have fallen into companionable silence….

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Software review: TeamworkPM

General information Name: TeamworkPM Vendor: Digital Crew Application Developers Hosting options: Web hosted version only Cost and plans: 30 day free trial. From $12pm for a personal plan to $149pm for enterprise plan. Languages: 24 languages including Norwegian and Indonesian. Currency: Has a long list of standard currencies. Basic features: building projects Creating a new…

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Research shows women don’t want management jobs

Intellect’s Women in IT Forum and womenintechnology.co.uk recently released the results of their survey about women working in the technology profession. The survey shows that although 8% of women have reached director-level roles, up 3% on 2007, many women are not interested in pursuing pure management roles and want to remain doing hands on, technical jobs….

Is project management training really effective?

There’s a whole industry around certification training for project managers. Job adverts declare that you have to be PMP® certified or a PRINCE2® Practitioner. But does training actually make a difference to how you do your job? Training can make you about 26% more effective, according to research by PM Solutions (link broken as at…

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How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 2: Dealing with the Challenges

In my last post about project management in a matrix structure I shared 4 challenges of that environment. This week I want to talk about how we can overcome these. This was a topic that Shilpa Arora, PMP, spoke about at a Women in Technology event I attended. The 4 challenges she discussed were: Let’s…

Using social media tools for communication: a case study

One of the questions I’m asked frequently is: “How do I use social media tools for communication?” I addressed this during my presentation at the PMI Leadership Institute Meeting in Dublin (in 2011), and one of the organisations I drew on to illustrate how other people are doing it was the Chartered Management Institute. The…

Taking resources from the matrix

How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 1: Understanding the Matrix

Most projects operate in some kind of matrixed environment. Project managers rarely have direct line management responsibility for all, if any, of the people on the project team. So how can we best get things done when we don’t control the team? In this article, I’ll explain what matrix management is and why it creates…