“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…
General information Name: Less MeetingVersion: 1.3.2, I tested the iPad appVendor: Less MeetingHosting options: Web hostingCost and plans: Free trial, then between $12 and $499 per month, with discounts for charitable organisationsLanguages: English Basic features: creating meetings Less Meeting is meeting productivity tool. It allows you to create agendas, share minutes and manage your meeting…
I can do my project communications work for The Otobos Group from anywhere but when I work for my employer I sometimes need to travel. Nap time is about 9am and it feels weird to be north of Coventry before my son is due for a sleep. We don’t often have meetings in Birmingham and…
Angel Berniz, Director of ProjectManagers.org, spoke at Nordic Project Zone. He’s talking about ISO 21500, the new project management standard. I caught up with him to find out why this new standard is important and how it will impact project managers. Angel, tell me why the new ISO 21500 standard is important for project management?…
Adrian Dooley, director of APMG and originally a construction project manager before he started helping other people do their projects better, was another one of the Conference: Zero presenters last month. He was reflecting on the APM’s vision of a world where all projects succeed, and his main point was that we need culture change…