Lack of face-to-face time makes cohesion difficult to achieve on distributed teams. Collaboration software can help, with forums for information exchange that enhance productivity and accountability. Along the way, it should also make “getting things done” more rewarding and spontaneous. Here are four keys to keeping your virtual team connected.
Congratulations, you just accepted a job as CIO, now what? What you do during your first 30 days on the job will most likely determine your future success. The strategy you deploy is critical and will vary greatly with the circumstances you are inheriting. Here's a look at our first round of possible success strategies, which involve building peer constituencies and assessing perceptions.
It is said the only thing constant is change, but it could also be said that change is constantly avoided, denied and feared. Like it or not, when it comes to change, project managers are usually right in the middle of it. Here is a three-step approach to help you lead in tumultuous times.
Now that you've built yourself an intranet, you'll have to maintain it. This Microsoft Project plan will help you do just that.
The ulimate goal of any organization is to keep its stakeholders happy. That's how you thrive in business. This presentation explains how you can design your IS function to uphold the objectives of the organization in meeting this most important goal.
After more than 20 years in the financial services industry, this writer thought he knew exactly what to anticipate moving into his new role as a software vendor project manager. He was wrong...
Project management has its roots in technical environments and appears to be returning to those roots after years of being a haven for generalists. But does this trend short-change PM experience and resourcefulness? Is technical expertise really required?
As Agile evolves beyond software development, its people-centric mandate is a natural ally to the social technology revolution transforming today’s enterprises. Here, a leading strategist in the social business landscape shares his thoughts on the interplay of these two movements, including how Kanban and DevOps fit.
Being the Techno-Wizard isn't enough anymore. If CIOs are going to get the respect that they want (and deserve) as members of the Executive Team, they have to learn to be leaders. Here are five skills to brush up on if you want to make it in the big leagues.
Last month we looked at how agile methods provide multiple opportunities for embracing proactive risk management. This month’s article extends risk management beyond the project manager role and introduces the benefits of making it more of a collaborative team exercise.
What is worse for a CIO than a bad economy? An uncertain economy, and that's exactly where we'll be heading in 2011. CIOs will have to shift strategies--if not priorities--to weather the upcoming turbulence in the business atmosphere. Hold on tight and read on for advice to keep you on steady ground.
With the politics of government projects also comes the demands of stakeholders, and there are often a diverse number of them who have expectations of what projects are to deliver. The process of stakeholder engagement is a crucial one in managing government projects, but it is also one that is fraught with issues and challenges.
“Project manager” does not mean “stakeholder gatekeeper”. The PM always seems to control that relationship, but there is a better way: When the relationship between team members and stakeholders is working, it’s the PM’s responsibility to stay out of the way.
You will have to fight against the gravitational pull of negative organizational climate to achieve the engagement of project workers and others. Use these tactics to help you win the battle.
What does the future of PM have in store? Three trends have the potential of being very powerful for project management and the organizations that continue to pursue the discipline.
Agile methods incorporate many mechanisms for dealing with late-breaking changes that also lend themselves to proactively responding to risks. Here we explore how these methods make effective risk management easier to implement.
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.
While working for a small firm, a new PM was asked to go to a major company to help them integrate their IT PMOs...leading to the worst three months of his career. As his two-part article concludes, we find out if if there was truly a light at the end of the tunnel--or just a train coming the other way.
This Powerpoint presentation dishes up formulas to help you make a bullet-proof business case for component-based application package development and deployment.
Project managers usually tend to focus on the methodology for executing the technical part of the project. However, a good understanding of a practical SOA landscape and its associated challenges can help a technical PM make the SOA adoption on technology projects run even smoother.
The RFP you just got is asking for a distributed generic billing system. Use this comprehensive document as a framework to write your own proposal for building and implementing a winner of a distributed application.
Part 1 of this two-part series introduces the agile engineering principles and practices that, when implemented, enable some teams and their respective organizations to build high-quality software very quickly that will please customers. Organizations embracing these practices--when used in conjunction with agile and lean management practices--can gain delivery advantages on their competitors while managing lower maintenance and support costs in the long term.
This presentation is the supporting document for this video. It shows you how to focus on business objectives, write practical project plans, cope with changing priorities, deliver continuous and effective communication, build confidence in your project management abilities, and most important...make it all look easy.
How we function in a team is critical. Teams exist because we can’t be successful on our own; we need some help, we need specialist expertise and we need people to contribute to the heavy lifting. Put multiple people in a room together, however, and the challenges of communication, collaboration, confusion and conflict quickly come to the fore.
The Requirements Management Plan is primarily used for communications, giving all stakeholders a view on how this process is managed for your project. It completely answers the very common question, "How are you identifying and managing your project requirements?"
With less emphasis on upfront specs and higher rates of change, how are agile projects contracted? Part 2 of this article outlines building blocks for creating agile contracts.
While many consider politics to bring out the worst in people and try to shy away from or ignore internal and external politics, they are a reality in the corporate world. Ideally, politics can be a force put to use for the common good--are you utilizing the power?
The body of knowledge for SRM is still developing, and combining the best ideas from many viewpoints will yield a better approach. This article provides a more thorough look at SRM and presents some basic ideas that will help you in your development of your company’s SRM framework.
So you want a career in project management? What will it take to be successful, and what about earning potential? This article will explore the pursuit of a career in project management, including looks at characteristics of successful PMs, what employers are looking for and salaries.
At the beginning of a project, plans are all about approximations. So what aspect of reality is it that creeps into projects and seems to shatter those estimates? Here are seven traps to watch out for...
Every project has a story to tell and from each story comes the chance to change and improve the way we do the next one. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, we don't often take this opportunity as we rarely complete lessons learned exercises and integrate their results. It can be a very powerful learning tool for individuals, teams, and organizations to examine what went well and what didn't. A good lessons learned session is more than just an exercise in asking questions. It is about the willingness to hear the answers and make the necessary changes to avoid the same problems on current and future projects. It is not about finger pointing. It is about collectively assessing opportunities to build stronger projects. This Change HEADWAY webinar will explore what makes a good lessons learned discussion work.
Your project work climate may be bad enough for you to adopt an unusual set of workforce management techniques to be successful. (Would you tell an overworked worker to do something extra? You might want to think twice about that...)
Quality is hard to build and maintain, and very easy to destroy. Here we look at some of the areas where those bad decisions are commonly made--and see if there's help in navigating through the minefield.
The manager of an evidence-gathering team of law professionals has reached a verdict, and it is in favor of project management. Bryan Melchionda spoke with Projects@Work about the growing need for bringing well-coordinated project management principles to the electronic discovery phase of large, complex legal cases.
The use of supplier relationship management (SRM) can be considered symbiotic in nature, since the mutually beneficial aspects of having such a two-way dependent/supportive partnership can make each party’s success tied to the other’s. Can we relate?
Technical debt describes the cumulative consequences of cutting corners in software development, but it escapes the attention of many project managers as they focus on scope and schedule. That’s a mistake because it impacts both. Here are questions to help you ascertain the real state of technical affairs.
Managing risk at the portfolio level requires a balanced approach and the exercise of judgement, both when we create the portfolio and as we execute the projects within it. Here are some fundamental steps and key principles.
While working for a small firm, a new PM was asked to go to a major company to help them integrate their IT PMOs...leading to the worst three months of his career. In this two-part article, he guides you through his experience: what he did, what he took from it and how he would do things differently.
Do you build it from scratch, or do you buy it off the shelf? This checklist will help you make an intelligent decision.
We are connected on a global scale these days and--with few exceptions--everyone is competing to get the customer. As a result, we have all been tasked to embrace change or else someone will gladly take our place in the industry.
Sometimes a pure agile approach is not appropriate for a particular project — the important thing is getting the work done, not strict adherence to a process. Still, a non-agile project can benefit from the inherent values of agile, including strong team collaboration, prioritized, incremental development, and regular progress assessment and adaptation.
Kara Marx, chief information officer for Methodist Hospital of Arcadia, discusses the challenges of balancing strategic goals with innovation, building consensus among diverse constituencies, and simplifying communication and methodologies.
This writer has seen some truly atrocious project communications where the PMO seems at a loss to be able to assist. In this article, he looks at a few ways that the PMO may be able to assist in building a communications model that brings consistency without burying the PM in “dashboard hell”.
Patience and diligence are required if you want your great idea to go the distance in many corporate IT environments. Here's some help in combating a handful of potential roadblocks.
The Mayans may have had the first timeboxed project--they had a strict 2012 timebox cutoff with little room for extension (you know, since the world would no longer exist). Although agile methods have been preaching the benefits of fixed timeboxed schedules since their creation, it still raises concerns with many stakeholders. That's because timeboxing with flexing scope is the worst form of project compromise--until, that is, you try the alternatives.
While many organizations now have standard processes for managing change, effective change management needs more than just a process. Most projects have room for improvement, and in this article we look at how a PM can lay the foundation for strong change management right from project initiation.
Are you putting together a data warehouse? This Microsoft Project plan will help you keep tabs on all the complex stages and steps involved in building decision support systems and a knowledge-based applications architecture and environment.
This excellent Microsoft Project plan will help you implement a complete life cycle project to design and build a data warehouse.
Why does your client want to build an intranet and what content do they want to disseminate? Prioritize the goals, issues, risks and solutions for setting up and maintaining an intranet site.
You have a bright idea deserving of funding and implementation. Here's how to get it down on paper so your boss and a sponsor with deep pockets will say, That's brilliant. Do it!
