Make the Vision Real: Scope Your Next Project with User Story Mapping
Find out how to do user story mapping on your next project. Learn the benefits and how to get everyone engaged with this simple technique for understanding project scope.
Teams
Learn how to manage teams and create the environment to help people do their best work.
Is your project team a sales force in disguise?
This is a guest post by Jon Swain, President of Ten Six Consulting. Strong project sponsorship is critical to ensuring that your project is a success. One of the roles of a sponsor is to champion the project and the project team. This includes making sure the project gets the recognition and resources it requires….
Advising Upwards: Interview with Dr Lynda Bourne
Today I’m interviewing Dr Lynda Bourne, author of Advising Upwards: A Framework for Understanding and Engaging Senior Management Stakeholders (Gower, 2011). Lynda is CEO of Stakeholder Management Pty Ltd, a training and consultancy firm based in Australia. Lynda, your book is about helping project managers communicate better with executive stakeholders. Let’s start at the beginning….
Focus on Coaching: Susanne Madsen on the power of questions
This short series is looking at coaching in a project management environment. Today I’m interviewing Susanne Madsen, author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook and herself a coach. Hello Susanne. Tell me, what made you go into coaching in the first place? I started coaching and mentoring project managers because I wanted to make a…
Focus on Coaching: expert team coaching with Phil Hayes
Phil Hayes is a coach with over 20 years experience in team development. He’s executive director of London training and coaching company Management Futures. I spoke to Phil about how team coaching can work with project teams. Phil, I’ve heard about coaching individuals, and I can see how you could extend that to a functional…
How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 2: Dealing with the Challenges
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…
How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 1: Understanding the Matrix
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…
Tackling the issues of cross-border projects
This is the last in a 3-part series about managing cross-cultural and international teams. Missed the earlier posts? Read the first bit here, and the second bit here.The biggest issues for international projects are cultural understanding and communication. The former isn’t something that can be neatly tackled by a software package. It relies on the…
Cross-border projects
This is the first in a 3-part series about managing cross-cultural and international teams. The world of business is continually shrinking: we work in an environment with real-time audio visual communication with colleagues on the other side of the world and online translation tools. Even small companies can operate internationally with outsourcing agreements and partners…