I speak at events every so often, mainly to project management audiences, but occasionally to techies. For example, I spoke at a BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, event earlier this year on conflict management in teams, to their Young Professionals Group. They were all much more technical than me – web developers, infrastructure people,…
As if adopting Agile wasn’t scary enough, Keith Richards from KRC talked about the 8 dangers of Agile at the APM conference last month. And here they are: It arrives bottom up “We don’t really want the techies taking over the organisation,” said Keith. “This bottom up stuff is a bit dangerous.” He made the…
I attended the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards last night, as I’d been nominated in the Project Management category. And… I won! I also won the Blog of the Year award, selected by the judges and IBM who were the sponsor, and I was runner up in the IT Professional Female category, which was won…
In this video I ask Josh Nankivel from pmStudent.com why he has chosen to use Kanban for managing the tasks for his project team. A transcript of this video is below. Elizabeth Harrin: Hello! My name is Elizabeth Harrin from the blog “A Girl’s Guide to Project Management” and I’m here today with a fellow…
Agile is: Change friendly Iterative Collaborative Chunked delivery Communications focused Business focused Scope tolerant Quality focused (if you do it correctly!) These were the themes that set the tone for Keith Richards’ presentation at the APM Conference in London last month. “The basics of project management seem to have been thrown away with some Agile,”…
In this video I talk to Josh Nankivel from pmStudent.com, about new trends in project management (and some pitfalls), specifically around collaboration tools and social media. A transcript follows below. We’re on the bank of the Potomac River, in National Harbour, Maryland, just down from Washington, D.C. Josh Nankivel: Hello everyone! This is Josh from…
I recently took the 5 day Managing Successful Programmes (MSP®) course with Maven Training. I’ve done courses with Maven in the past, and I’ve also met many of their team and their CEO Melanie Franklin. But the reason I choose them this time was because of their innovative approach to delivering training in a way…
Just as Sarah Brown is launching her new initiative, Women: Inspiration and Enterprise, we get news of more evidence of discrepancies in women’s pay. The good news is that according to CMI research, this year our salaries rose by 2.8% compared to 2.3% for men. The bad news is that we are still way behind…
“I don’t think there are any magic bullets to deal with the uncertainty we face,” said David Cleden, when he presented at the Gower/NCPM Experts’ Forum earlier this year. His presentation was on organisational strategies for dealing with uncertainty. Cleden brought up the famous ‘known/unknowns’ diagram and pointed out that the commonly-seen version with four…
“The role of director of user experience is pretty new,” says Steve Ballard, who has taken on this position at project management software company Workfront. “In consumer software it’s not so new. The product has to sell itself so the focus is on products that are useful.” The difference with software you use at work…
The July issue of Project Management Tipoffs from Arras People included their fun attempt at updating the phonetic alphabet, along with a challenge to readers to have a go at creating their own. Here’s my attempt, with a distinctly PM feel: Want to know what Zombie PM is? I’ll tell you next week!
“The risk people are the business prevention people,” said David Hillson, at the beginning of his presentation at the Gower Experts’ Forum at the National Centre for Project Management. He pointed out that the results from the 2009 CHAOS report aren’t that much better than those when CHAOS started out: last year the survey reported…