Back in 2009 I wrote a post about career and personal goals, and what I wanted to achieve before I was 35. I made a list of 5 things. They were: See polar bears in the natural habitat Knit myself a jumper that I’ll actually wear Read Herodotus’ The Histories (which has sat unopened on…
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….
Software September continues with a look at iPad applications for business. Last year, I got an iPad. I didn’t choose to buy one: it was the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards prize. I wasn’t expecting to win it, and I’d only ever seen one before. The people with me that evening were ecstatic at the…
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…
Jeff Furman is the author of The Project Management Answer Book. I asked him why he wrote it and what it was like putting the book together. Hello, Jeff. Tell me why you wrote The Project Management Answer Book? Hi, Elizabeth. When I approached the milestone of my 500th PM trained, I felt I had…
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….
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…
Rick, welcome to A Girl’s Guide to Project Management! Can you give us a short description of what your book is about? The Cure for the Common Project is all about making the jump from project manager to project leader. Processes, tools, and templates are one thing. But they can be completely undermined by low…
This is a guest post by Conrado Morlan, the Smart PM. Dear Smart PM… I am a new hire at the project management office of a large corporation. I had been working in project management for several years as a freelancer. Although I consider myself to be a good networker, I found difficulties networking within…
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…
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…
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…