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…
Dr Eliyahu Goldratt, the management expert who developed Critical Chain project management, has passed away. Dr Goldratt was the author of The Goal, which has sold over 13 million copies since publication in 1984. He also wrote Critical Chain. His theories are still influential – he’s quoted in The Project Management Answer Book by Jeff…
I’m delighted to announce that the APM’s youngest ever female fellow has been appointed and her name is… Elizabeth Harrin. – Penny Pullan, CoChair, WiPM SIG I have had the results from my application for Fellowship of the Association for Project Management – and I’m now a Fellow! (Thanks to Brendan for the title of…
Jovia Nierenberg is Chief Operating Officer at Experience in Software. That’s the company behind the new project management tool Webplanner. She’s only 23. I asked her about her life as a COO, what’s next for Webplanner and her advice for young women wanting to work in project management. Jovia, how did you end up being…
Imagine working in a company with 10,000 people. You’re working on a secret project. You don’t know your colleagues from the next room. You don’t know what the overall project objectives are. You don’t know who else is on the project team and you can’t tell anyone what you’re working on. All you know is…