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“Make your boss look good,” writes Guy Kawasaki, in his new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions. “Sure, changing the world, delighting customers, and increasing shareholder value are all part of the big picture, but making your boss look good is your day-to-day job. You should do this within the boundaries…
Agile techniques are increasingly important to project managers and the organizations they serve, and PMI® hasn’t been blind to this fact. There was enough publicity about Agile at the Global Congress in Washington, D.C. last year that I don’t think it is much of a surprise the PMI has chosen to embrace agile practices and…
Projects don’t always go to plan. In fact, do they ever? When things are progressing generally in the right direction it’s a good idea to run a healthcheck just to see if the project is likely to make it or not. The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects: An Insiders Guide to Managing IT Investment and…
I wish I hadn’t given this book away. It’s a desk reference for the kind of job I do now – managing project managers – and it’s very, very useful. Optimizing Human Capital with a Strategic Project Office: Select, Train, Measure, and Reward People for Organization Success by J. Kent Crawford and Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin has…
“[T]he time has come when we need to admit we (the program/project manager, business customer, product architect/designer, other stakeholders) do not know the solutions to the problems… and indeed, that “we” – our methods, our habits, our leadership styles, our assumptions – are part of the problem,” writes Karen R. J. White in her book,…
Acting Up Brings Everyone Down, the new book from Nick McCormick, is subtitled The Impacts of Childish Behavior in the Workplace. The contents can be summed up in McCormick’s favourite piece of advice from the book: Don’t Be A Jerk. The book looks at how behaviour in the workplace often mimics behaviour you’d more likely…
Suddenly America makes sense. Larry and Meagan Johnson, a father and daughter team, have written a book that explains that people are the product of their environment. Working with Baby Boomers? Expect a strong focus on education as a result of the GI Bill. Got Generation Y people joining your team? Be a ‘concerned coach’…
This book has a rather long subtitle: 101 Ways to Conduct Business with Charm and Savvy. I flicked straight to the back to read what Ann Marie Sabath had to say about working with Brits. I thought it was funny that she advises using ‘How do you do?’ I haven’t heard that for ages, but…
Lots of books talk about how to ‘do’ networking, and there are plenty of reasons why networking is important for your career. The thing I liked best about Lucy Rosen’s Fast Track Networking: Turning Conversations Into Contacts book is that it does actually tell you the answers to the things that really matter like: Where…
There’s a skills shortage. If you haven’t noticed it yet you will do when the baby boom generation starts to retire. There just aren’t enough people entering the workforce to keep up with demand, and meet the needs of my generation’s pension funds. Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our Next Economic Revolution…
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…
“Evaluating success depends on the scale you select and varies based on one’s aspirations and self-image,” writes Kathryn Ullrich in Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success. So you could consider yourself a successful project manager if your peer group are working on smaller projects than you, or you are managing the biggest project…