Workforce Management > Compensation and Benefits

Project Management Institute reports that 71 percent of project managers saw an increase in compensation over the last 12 months.

There are plenty of project managers who, at the age of 40 (and up) consider changing jobs, but pause. Why? Well, plenty of professional people worry--and with good reason--about age discrimination in the IT world today. We have all heard the horror stories and, of late, the not-so-subtle hints from the executive recruiters that you may be more "difficult to market." How can this be with all of your years of experience? If anything, the "marketing" challenge should be getting easier--shouldn't it?

Studies continue to pound home the importance of work/life balance to workforce satisfaction and productivity. But is the frustrated project manager helpless to do anything? This journey takes two steps.

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.

Was it your grandmother who said, "You get more flies with honey than with vinegar"? Why Granny wanted to get flies, I'll never know, but when you're trying to get happy, productive, team members, positive reinforcement is the honey you've been looking for.

Game mechanics can be applied to the discipline of project management, both as a motivational and training aid. By making project work more enjoyable through real-time recognition and rewards, gamification can also improve team productivity and individual performance.

To find the source of motivation for your agile project, let us ask the most important question: How do you feel about your project? When we feel deep positive emotions about the project, we can tap into a rich source of energy and creativity.

Unlike many assets, the value of a customer relationship is hard to measure. You might be able to determine how much in terms of dollars and cents their collaborations have benefited you, but estimating the true cash value they represent is tough to determine.

While managing three virtual software implementations, this writer learned several tactical tips to remember when working with virtual teams.

It used to be that workers were simply beaten or intimidated to get them to perform. For some of us, this time continues, but for others the world has become more complex. We need an organizing principle for workforce management. Even though we are familiar with the traditional concepts of quality, cost, and time, these are merely measurements of some higher standard.

IT governance is evolving, but some fundamental practices hold true. Whether your organization is implementing processes for the first time or reassessing and remaking existing ones, here are some proven paths to follow and pitfalls to avoid.

It’s no secret that command-and-control management methods aren’t very effective at motivating today’s workforce to produce greater value with fewer resources. At Toyota, the role of Shusa instills a sense of personal ownership in project outcomes. Here are thoughts on creating a similar environment for your teams.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that technology-based companies are still struggling to deal with the problems plaguing the current economy. But a new report hints at happier times ahead.

The state of the CIO is stagnant, according to the latest industry surveys. We've taken a look at what they say and boiled them down to the essential message for CIOs: align or die.

A concerted effort to manage and document the realization of business benefits is an indispensible key to the success of any program. It requires a well-defined business case and a structured approach to measuring and tracking the planned benefits throughout the program lifecycle.

Survey examines compensation for business analysts based on education, experience, location, company size, certifications and related factors.

The telecommuting movement has gained significant ground and continues to be a growing field. But recent studies have found only about four percent of the workforce in the United States share the benefits of telecommuting.

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.

When it comes down to it, stakeholders are all sorts of people that can benefit from positive operations. Here we take a closer look at understanding who they are--and why they're important.

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.

Successful business execution is dependent upon having timely and accurate financial information. But too often, little thought is put into how to present the data in a meaningful way. From a project or portfolio perspective, what does a C-Level executive expect to see from the PMO for actionable decision-making?

Distributed project teams are a reality of today’s business world, and the ability to enlist them while upholding Agile principles can bring great advantages as well as real challenges. Our 38-page report looks at those challenges but focuses on the benefits of working with distributed agile teams — and how to achieve them.

Be careful when negotiating salaries. Undersell yourself and you stand to lose a lot of money, not to mention beat yourself up when you learn about friends cementing better deals. Go too high and you could be left hanging dry. Here are some tips and snafus from the scary world of salary negotiations.

A recent IT salary survey had some pretty promising results. And if you look at many surveys over the past 18 months, the same jobs constantly appear. The magic career word that keeps coming up on virtually every hot job survey is...

Demand for skilled project managers shown in Project Management Institute’s latest salary survey.

Establishing a program management office is a project in Itself. And like all projects, you need a charter that presents a clear and measurable purpose, scope, schedule, quality, budget, risks and critical success factors. Here are guidelines for creating a charter for your PMO project.

What you do during your first 30 days as CIO 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 part two of our examination of possible success strategies, which involves assessing various aspects of the IT organization.

A new survey from Project Management Institute identifies key trends in project, program and portfolio management, including a renewed focus on talent development and increased use of agile methods. The results also point to critical success factors, among them clearly defining expected benefits, ensuring top-level management support, and creating a career path for project participants.

Learn more about this must-read book for anyone interested in customer relationship management.

There is lots of great information available on how to use agile methods for custom software development projects, but less so for package implementations. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf solutions make up a large percentage of the IT projects undertaken by companies each year, and many organizations are missing out on benefits that an agile package approach can bring.

The key challenge to organizational PM is that companies tend to view projects in isolation by ignoring the obvious (and sometimes not-so-obvious) linkages. Here we present a list of essential factors to ensure the organization can begin to not just benefit from the discipline of project management, but be able to maximize the benefits that organizational PM can provide.

It appears that although the global economic recovery has been sluggish, IT departments are bouncing back even more slowly. Why the lag? It has something to do with high expectations and low confidence. As usual, it's up to the mighty CIO to bridge that widening gap.

There's gold in them thar PMP hills! Are you mining for it? Three primary benefits await for those that pass the PMP exam, making the hard work well worth it.

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.