To be successful in achieving our goals, project managers need to build a culture of efficiency within their teams. In this article, we explore how we build that culture of efficiency without sacrificing project quality--a step made all the more challenging given the economic constraints we face today.

Rather than being half empty, maybe the glass is actually half full. One writer argues that the opportunities for project management to make inroads in an organization are actually better now than they have been for many years. Let’s look at some different scenarios.

Despite this global recession, the competitive landscape keeps becoming more urgent and faster paced. You will be expected to keep managing new projects to keep your organization competitive--but will do so with less (and exhausted) resources, tight budgets and more scrutiny for success. How does one meet such challenges and succeed? One of the agile practices tailor made for such an environment is the Lean method.

A rocket won’t overcome gravity's pull without the right trajectory and energy. Likewise, a project needs systems in place at launch to have a chance of soaring. In this excerpt, we set the stage for a successful liftoff, which requires a shared understanding of team roles and objectives. An agile chartering framework can help.

Establishing productive working relationships with your project team is as critical as building the plan, managing risk or reporting to stakeholders. It requires accessibility, adaptability and authenticity. Here are seven principles that can help you help your team members maximize their individual and collective value.

A huge challenge we face as project leaders is creating an atmosphere where everyone on the team takes ownership of their tasks and the bigger picture. To get people to commit on a deeper level, tools need to go beyond status updates; they need to provide transparency and visibility into the meaning behind the work.

With the recent economic challenges, project pressures have grown even more--there’s less money available, and that means fewer resources and a need to get money-making (and money-saving) work completed more swiftly than ever. Can project teams be the secret to better project management in the future?

As Kanban is applied to longer projects up to three months in duration, the principles of visibility, flow, variability and improvement are still in full effect, but challenges must be taken into account, including larger teams and higher-level sponsors, increased uncertainty and complexity, and, by extension, greater organizational pressures.

There is a huge difference between using Agile practices and being Agile. Here, a chief engineer discusses his organization’s strides in creating an Agile mindset and a customized approach to producing high-quality work in short time frames. The journey offers practical advice and techniques to those getting started or struggling with Agile transformation.

There is a cost to project management; it is not free, and it does not happen by magic. When this writer looks at where he got into trouble as a project manager as he was developing his career, he can point to very specific failures--ones that inexorably led to fundamental problems on the projects that he was responsible for. Trace back from those problems, and some concrete and specific themes emerge.

Doing more with less people, less tools and less funding has become the norm--and 2012 doesn’t look to be much different. How can you continue to service a growing backlog of project requests in the face of static or shrinking budgets and a dwindling pool of project professionals? Believe it or not, there are things that can be done and ways to keep progress moving forward. Here are 10 tips you might find useful.

There’s no manual for a recession, so how do you stay effective in a bad economy? In this article, we look at how you as project managers can strive to balance the reality of managing projects in a tough economy with the desire to still do things “the right way”.

How have things changed in the world of CIO priorities, IT strategies, salaries, spending and such since September of 2010? Certainly the rise of the Cloud has had an impact on CIO thinking--as has the anemic and languishing global economy.