The Agile voting mechanism known as "Fist of Five" is a great way to drive your team towards consensus and commitment. It's a simple, powerful process that can strengthen alignment and increase transparency on your projects. Here’s a look at how — and why — it works.
Effective project activation is more than just hard work and good luck. It's an important focus on the work required to bring the project up to speed, and this article explores some ways to get from zero to 60 as quickly as possible.
Across 37 countries included in PMI’s latest salary survey, Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification holders report higher median salaries than those without the certification. This is a key finding of the upcoming Earning Power: Project Management Salary Survey 10th Edition―a leading source of data on project practitioner earning―incorporating responses from more than 33,000 project management practitioners.
We often want people to feel that certain tasks are urgent. In order to do that, we have to create consequences to get people to act with urgency in otherwise non-urgent situations. This means that we deliberately want people to feel that something bad could happen if they don’t work quickly. And that's a problem. A culture of urgency makes it difficult for long-term thinking, and reinforces finding the quick fix.
Is your work more industrial-worker based or knowledge-worker based? The way people work together on projects has changed. Have your project management methods kept up?
Can a project manager manage their team virtually, and if so what adjustments are necessary? To be successful, a virtual PM has to overcome many communication-related issues. Here we explore an effective approach.
With all of us coming to terms with remote working, some interactions are more challenging than others—and performance management is one of the toughest. How can new PMs in particular approach these potentially uncomfortable conversations?
Why do sponsors refuse to provide contingency for risks? It’s not going to go away, you know! It's time to talk about reserves--the amount of time and money that needs to be put aside to cope with the risks on a project. In particular, we want to look at the mindset of the sponsor who refuses to acknowledge this contingency in the budget and schedule.
All conflicts—no matter how big or small—are harmful to projects. They all impact time, cost and our credibility. Let's bring into focus the importance of managing conflicts to ensure that our projects succeed.
While there is no one formula for conflict resolution, it's helpful to have some strategies, some models to guide our thought process. This article outlines some basic models for conflict resolution to be aware of—and maybe incorporate if they help in your situation.
"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."