Last Thursday was International Project Management Day, and, along with 800 other project managers, I attended Synergy, a ‘day of celebration’ in London. None of us really knew what to expect. It had never been billed as a traditional conference and it was held at the IndigO2, part of the O2 arena which mainly hosts…
Tomorrow is International Project Management Day, and the UK’s big event to celebrate is Synergy. Over 1000 project managers are due to converge on the O2 arena in London. I spoke to Chris Field, who is the UK PMI Chapter President and one of the organizers. When there is so much doom and gloom, and…
Eric Jenett, founder member of PMI and PMI Fellow, died yesterday aged 88. Mr Jenett was the very first person to become a PMP. He received a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University and then spent much of his career with Brown and Root in Houston, Texas. He was also a founding member…
Students coming to study in London for the new university term will quickly realize that in the capital you generally do not assume positive intent. In fact, Not Assuming Positive Intent is the default. You assume that other commuters will fight you for the last tube seat. You assume that your pockets will get picked…
Back in 2009 I wrote a post about career and personal goals, and what I wanted to achieve before I was 35. I made a list of 5 things. They were: See polar bears in the natural habitat Knit myself a jumper that I’ll actually wear Read Herodotus’ The Histories (which has sat unopened on…
The best thing about going to the hairdressers is having someone wash my hair. The second best thing is being able to sit there for an hour and be lost in my thoughts while someone makes me beautiful. I don’t talk to my hairdresser about holidays or work, and we have fallen into companionable silence….
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…