“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….
I didn’t know what to expect from Ann Pilkington’s book, Communicating Projects. It isn’t about just about producing a communication plan and while it is broadly aligned to the APM Body of Knowledge (6th Edition) it isn’t a guide to doing things according to any particular method or standard. It turns out that the book…
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…
This is a review of the PMI-RMP Prepkit course version 5, first published in 2018. If you are planning to take the PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)® credential, then you’d be advised to get yourself some study materials. After all, the Practice Standard for Project Risk Management doesn’t exactly make riveting reading, and PMI itself…
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…
Ever wondered why some people get stuff done and some people don’t? The people who do (and I expect you’d count yourself in that group if you are a project manager) tend to have the right attitude and a simple process for staying organized and completing tasks. Whether you call that project management or not…
Make it Fly by Brigitte Cobb is subtitled “The step-by-step guide to make ANY idea, project or goal take off.” It’s a project management book with a difference – it’s not about project management and it’s not aimed at project managers. It’s just a method to get things done. However, by page 40 there’s a…
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…