Project Management Blogs

Have a Nice Conflict

BATimes_May17_FeatureWe as Project Managers are often faced with difficult situations and have to resolve any and all conflicts that arise with our stakeholders.  We are very adept at our hard skills but often our soft skills go lacking.  One of the skills most often called upon, but in most cases the one we are the least comfortable with, is conflict resolution.  Most of us are conflict averse and unsure how to manage or resolve conflict.  We know that according to the PMBOK the preferred method of conflict resolution is “confrontation.”

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An Agile Framework - Part 3- Four Agile Project Management Techniques.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem -- in my opinion -- to characterize our age.

Albert Einstein

This blog entry is Part 3 of a 5-part series laying out the elements of an Agile framework. It presents 4 techniques generally included in Agile methodologies, and discusses which of the 8 principles presented in Part 2 are usually implemented through them. I will try to explain why some of those techniques do not work sometimes, as well as why it is paramount to apply all of the 8 principles of Agile for Agile techniques to really succeed.

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Lessons Learned or Forgotten

Lessons learned must be one of the biggest time wasters in the discipline of project management. Most organizations do them to some extent. Most of the time nobody looks at them after the project is done. But still we keep trying to persuade people to do them. What do we expect? That they will learn from history? A wise man said (Churchill? Not sure), “The only thing we ever learned from history is that we never learn from history”.

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10 Ways to Use Requirements to Melt an Executive's Brain

(This blog first appeared in the Business Analyst Times, May 19 posting)

So you've been tasked to get requirements on a strategic project, and you're thinking to yourself, "How can I make my business requirements documents as incomprehensible as possible?" Going this route may not be just a job security thing. Making yourself indispensable as the interpreter of requirements seems to be the traditional route of delivery and getting buy-in. Just keep running the requirements process until someone gets desperate and finally signs off on the spec in the vain hope of getting something useful for their effort before the end of Q4 2014.

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Addressing Common Problems with Projects

A recent failure of a 60$M telecom project invites the question of why?  The answer:  poor leadership.

But this answer is too general.  It doesn't really help us understand what we can do as project leaders to increase the likelihood our projects are successful.

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Twenty Ideas du jour for the Practicing Project Manager

  1. It is best not to share the project plan with the project team as it leads to unnecessary and usually incredibly stupid questions.
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