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June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Passive Versus Active Learning
Categories:
Education
Categories: Education
| Most project management training is based primarily on passive learning: listening to an instructor, looking at slides or reading, for example. This kind of traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. Active learning, on the other hand, puts the responsibility on the student. Whether in class discussions or written exercises, they're compelled to read, speak, listen and think. One of the most powerful active learning models is experiential learning. Participants find meaning in experience -- learning through reflection and doing. As ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius once said: "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand." Let's say you want to teach the importance of planning before executing, for example. Instead of just explaining it, try this lesson in experiential learning. Give a bag of LEGO parts -- the toy building bricks -- to a group of students and ask them to build a car in five minutes. When the time is up, show a slide with the project phases: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Then ask them to identify which phase applied to which part of building the car. I challenge you to consider experiential learning programs for project managers. They observe and evaluate the effects of a situation as they participate -- and then apply this learning on actual projects. Have you tried experiential learning? What are the pros and cons over passive learning? |
Is Your Project Among the Best of the Best?
Categories:
PMI
Categories: PMI
| There's no shortage of project failures in the news. So it's especially important to recognize the excellence, innovation and hard work that go into completing a successful project. There's no better way to do so than by nominating your project for the coveted PMI Project of the Year Award.
Established in 1989, the award is among the most prestigious honors in the project management profession. But you must act quickly -- nominations for the 2011 PMI Project of the Year must be received by Tuesday, 1 March 2011. PMI encourages nominations for projects from around the world, regardless of size or industry. The winner will be announced in October at PMI® Global Congress 2011--North America in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, USA. Last year The National Ignition Facility Project submitted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, USA, took top honors. The finalists included the Dallas Cowboys Stadium Project, built for the U.S. football team in Texas and the Norton Brownsboro Hospital Project in Kentucky, USA. Receiving a professional award will enhance your résumé or CV and your career prospects. And Project of the Year is just one of many ways to showcase your successes -- you can also join in the bid for other 2011 PMI Professional Awards. Excellence in project management can't be celebrated without your help. All of the awards require your nominations for a person, project, organization, training product or literature. The nomination deadline for other PMI Professional Awards is 1 April 2011. Submissions for the 2011 PMI Eric Jenett Project Management Excellence Award and the PMI Distinguished Project Award are accepted throughout the year. Have you submitted your nomination for a PMI award yet? |
Should Failure Be Part of Your Career Plan?
Categories:
Career Development
Categories: Career Development
| Failure is a hard word. But we really can't know our limits if we don't sometimes test them. So how do we reconcile the fact that we may "fail" sometimes and still be successful practitioners? I can't say that every project I've ever managed has been a complete success. Not all of them have been delivered to full scope, on time and within budget. Nevertheless, I'm happy with my career and believe I'm a successful project manager. Clearly, there's more to career success than simply stringing together a run of successful projects. I don't know anyone who has done so. (And if I did, I would wonder if they might consider taking on a more challenging project next time.) There's a component of success that has to do with achievement and pushing ourselves beyond personal limitations. Not everyone is so forgiving of our project failures, but we must see the failures in the context of personal growth and our overall career. Career success is in the eye of the beholder. Whether or not we consider ourselves successful has to do in part with how we react when our projects fall short of complete success. If we emerge from project failure smarter, wiser, stronger, better -- or just humbler from the experience -- we are prepared to achieve a greater level of success. It's scary, but I think in the end we will judge ourselves more harshly if we don't explore and extend our limits than if we stay comfortably within them. Net: Fail to succeed. What do you think? Can failure eventually lend itself to career success? |
WBS and Schedule Network Diagrams: Unsung Heroes of Project Management
Categories:
New Practitioners
Categories: New Practitioners
| If I asked you how to bake a cake, you'd probably tell me to mix the ingredients in a bowl, pour the batter into a tin and bake until golden brown. But that's a deceptively simple answer for what is actually a multi-tiered process. In project management, you must detail every step needed to get the project done and the precise order in which to complete them. New project managers may not be used to doing things this way. Work breakdown structures (WBS) and schedule network diagrams can help them in forming a project management plan. A WBS illustrates all of the work that needs to get done to accomplish the objectives of the project, in order of importance. To create a WBS, you subdivide project elements into manageable components and keep breaking them down until you reach the work package level. A schedule network diagram visually depicts of how all the tasks in your schedule string together. While the WBS shows you how many tasks you have to accomplish, the schedule network diagram shows the order those tasks need to happen. Most tasks people perform on a daily basis aren't explicitly dependent on the order in which they occur. And when order does matter, we usually engage in that activity naturally. Our natural ability to skip details and abridge processes can save us time in everyday life. But this "normal" behavior could lead to disaster on a project where some tasks must precede or succeed others. Project managers might lose an opportunity to shorten schedules or see which tasks can run in parallel, for example. Do you use a WBS or schedule network diagram in your projects? |
An Agile Team's Recipe for Success
| In my experience coaching teams, I've found that some stand out in terms of productivity. Cathy Baker, PMP, is the certified ScrumMaster for one of my favorite agile teams. She has managed projects for 11 years, currently in the healthcare industry. Her team is a good example of a group that has learned from practical experience. I interviewed Ms. Baker to get her take on how her team improved efficiency and quality. Your team seems to really 'get' agile. What do you feel are the key success factors for your team? Ms. Baker: Strict adherence was certainly one. Rather than trying to bend the rules we were learning, we followed the practices by the book at first. We are gatekeepers of the process with each other. It is not me, the ScrumMaster, doing it. The whole team monitors the process. They challenge each other with questions like, "Is that what we should be doing?" So you didn't stray from the agile books? Ms. Baker: After we became fluent in agile, we changed our stand-up meeting to go task by task instead of person by person. Good retrospectives were also a key factor. Creative ideas helped us take agile beyond where we started and made it a custom fit for our team. So your team didn't start out as agile experts? Ms. Baker: Oh, no. They weren't born that way. They were tried and true waterfall folks. They were used to heavy plans that left little flexibility for change. Most of them had 15-plus years experience each using waterfall methodologies. What prompted you to go agile? Ms. Baker: Management wanted development to go faster and to produce more in less time. Was there resistance to agile at first? Ms. Baker: Yes. We heard "This is not going to work," "We'll be back to waterfall in six months," "Why are they making us do this?" "This is just a fad that's going to pass." What benefits do you find using agile? Ms. Baker: Agile is definitely more fun because we are so self-organized. We are more efficient and have moderately increased our quality of projects. We have such high buy-in among the team now; people get more and more out of the process as time goes on. I notice you use a physical taskboard to track tasks? Ms. Baker: It works. It's clear. 'If it isn't broke, don't fix it.' Of course, the taskboard has been a handicap with the one team member who meets with us by phone, but she can see a related spreadsheet. I do feel like one of our reasons for success is because all but one of us are located in the same place. Most members have worked on the same team together and average eight years of experience. There is a lot of respect. Thanks, Cathy for sharing your recipes for success: adherence, retrospectives, taskboards and self-organization. |