Scott Berkun, author of the hugely popular project management book Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management, has written a new book. Confessions of a Public Speaker is about Berkun’s life on the road as a speaker, and it is full of tips for people who have to give presentations. OK, as a project manager you…
Digité is head quartered in Mountain View, California and was started as a collaboration between two companies. The objective was to bring out a tool that would help people collaborate and fulfill the needs of a trend they had already spotted back in 2003, that of distributed teams. “It’s not a PPM tool trying to…
In this final instalment of the ‘working together’ series, I’ll be looking at how to improve the working relationships between project managers and business analysts. Changing working relationships is often more about culture than concrete tasks, but there are some things you can do to smooth any blips in the way that project managers and…
Recently I reviewed How to Manage in a Flat World: 10 Strategies to get connected to your team wherever they are by Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley. I was really interested in the shift towards flat structure management and a more coherent approach to managing dispersed teams, so I spoke to the authors to find…
I have reviewed ConceptDraw PROJECT and MINDMAP. The third and final piece in the ConceptDraw Office suite is ConceptDraw PRO. This, according to the vendor, “is a powerful diagramming and drawing tool that enables users to effectively visualize and communicate information and processes.” It’s a fancy drawing package, a bit like SmartDraw. It’s software that…
ConceptDraw Office is an entire software suite designed around the project management lifecycle. The first piece in the suite is ConceptDraw MINDMAP, which is “a business and personal productivity tool that collects ideas and organizes them into a visual map.” It’s a tool for on-screen brainstorming. I’ve never used mind mapping software before, being more…
(This post contains affiliate links. Read my full disclosure.)Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (Second Ed, 2013) ISBN 978-1780171715 Shortlisted for the 2014 CMI Management Book of the Year [amazon_textlink asin=’1780171714′ text=’Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’wwwelizabharr-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’e4e65f5c-2dea-11e8-bab1-f73377c9ff15′] uses a case-study…
SmartDraw is, according to the manufacturer, the world’s most popular business graphics software. It makes it easy to design “presentation-quality” graphics in “minutes, not hours.” I decided to put this to the test myself. When I put the SmartDraw 2008 CD in my PC, the installation window told me it would take 51 minutes to…
Today, all kinds of teams, including Agile software development, depend heavily on team and collaborative working. Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka aims to present practical ways to encourage a collaborative culture within development teams. Section 1 of the book defines what Tabaka means by collaboration and what the benefits of a collaborative culture look like,…
A Rebel’s Guide to Project Management provides practical solutions and easy-to-use templates to help you manage your projects more successfully. As well as that (and maybe more importantly) we are a community trying to get work done in the real world, not the ideal situations that the textbooks describe. If you juggle multiple projects, competing…
Sometimes it is not the work that makes work difficult, nor the people. Today the challenge that made my day more difficult than usual was something much more mundane: the arrival of a new telephone. It came with a three-fold leaflet explaining how to do a multitude of things, except set up my voicemail. A…