20 Resources to Make Your Projects Easier
Every project manager has resources and tools that they use to simplify their projects. Here are 20 resources that I use to make it easier to manage my projects.
This article contains affiliate links.
This article contains affiliate links.
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Project Management Answers: Interview with author Jeff Furman
The PMBOK® Guide v5 refresh introduced new topics for students taking the PMP exam. Jeff Furman, author of The Project Management Answer Book, has just released a second edition of his book, covering all that and more. It’s a weighty book to support students preparing for the PMP exam and also more generally in their…
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Networking made easy: An interview with Will Kintish
Is your summer stretching ahead with one cocktail networking event after another? No? Mine neither. However, there is always some kind of requirement to met new people as a project manager, even if it’s just your next project team. And as author Will Kintish says, networking is simply about building relationships. I asked him for…
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Can you really manage with just 5 milestones?
“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…
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The connected project manager
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…
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Managing your personal brand: an interview with Dr Andrew Makar
Today I’m interviewing Dr Andrew Makar, IT programme manager, blogger and author of Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy, about managing your personal brand at work and building a professional project management profile. Andy, why is it important to have a professional project management profile? Would you hire an individual dressed up in a bed…
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What is customer-centric project management?
This is an edited extract from my book Customer-Centric Project Management, co-authored with Phil Peplow (Routledge, 2012). Let’s get some basics established. Projects must deliver value. Projects must involve stakeholders, even if that stakeholder population is made up of only one person. These two things are the premise for customer-centric project management. The third premise…
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3 Steps to Presence: Book Review of The Power of Presence
Presence. It’s that thing all successful project and programme managers have. It’s when you walk into a room and the team subtly acknowledges you’ve arrived. You see it when the project team listen to a good project sponsor talking about the project’s objectives, or when a portfolio manager discusses the business benefits that will be…
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Talking Project Politics: Interview with Nita Martin
Politics. Every project has politics. Today I’m interviewing Dr Nita Martin, Managing Director of Pure Indigo. Nita’s book, Project Politics: A Systematic Approach to Managing Complex Relationships, deals with that difficult subject of how things get done on projects. Nita, ‘politics’ means different things to different people. How do you define project politics? ‘Project politics’…
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Getting some answers: an interview with Jeff Furman
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…
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Is project management training really effective?
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…
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Secret projects and wonderful women: Bletchley Park
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…
