Developing Project Management Potential – Part 2

February 22, 2010

Why our current approach at developing project manager is ineffective
In the last article in this series – Developing Project Management Potential Part 1 – we looked at the range of competencies it takes to be a great project manager. In this article I cover how we currently develop project managers and why this approach can [...]

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Help I Think I Have an Email Addiction!

February 18, 2010

My iPhone has been both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side are all the great apps, the ability to find good restaurants on any street and having all modes of communication at my fingertips. But on the downside it has created a compulsive desire to check my emails at a ridiculous frequency. [...]

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Critical Chain Project Management – Part 1

February 10, 2010

Why Projects Fail to Deliver on Time
In 1997 Eliyahu Goldratt attempted to come up with an answer to the perennial problem – why do so many projects deliver late? His response was the critical chain approach to project management. In this series of blogs I’m going to give you my take on the method starting [...]

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Self-organising Meetings & Conferences with Openspace

February 4, 2010

Harrison Owen, the inventor of Openspace, noticed that the most productive times in conferences and meetings where always in the coffee breaks! The time spent in the meetings themselves could be severely restricted by rigid agendas. At the breaks he could chat to like-minded people about topics that mattered. So he came up with an [...]

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Developing Project Management Potential – Part 1

January 28, 2010

What skills do you need to be a great project manager? How do you develop those skills using training and coaching? What are the differences between the two development approaches? Which is best? This series of articles will attempt to answer all these questions
Core Project Management Competencies.
Project management is a challenging role. You sit between [...]

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Five Best Management Books of 2009

December 9, 2009

Here are my favourite five business books that I read this year:
1)      Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney, tells the story of how Steve Jobs has moved from creating computers in a garage to leading a multi-million dollar organisation. It investigates the Apple approach; an obsession with design, ease-of-use and detail. It describes Jobs’s maverick [...]

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Why Prince2’s Quality Management Process is Flawed

December 4, 2009

Prince2 is a registered trademark of the Office of Government Commerce.
Prince2 has many excellent ideas for project management, but I think its approach to quality is at best weak and at worst entirely inappropriate. My first gripe is that Prince2 redefines what the word quality usually means. My dictionary defines it as a “degree or [...]

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Battle of the Planning Tools – Gantt Charts vs Burn Down Charts

November 26, 2009

Gantt charts are a useful tool in the planning phase, to understand the nature of the work to be completed. It clearly shows the tasks to be done, the ordering of the tasks, their start and end dates and who’s doing them. In my experience Gantt Charts showing a medium level of detail are best. [...]

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Estimating the Distance to the Moon using the Delphi Technique

November 19, 2009

A few weeks ago I ran one of my project management courses. Part of the week is about estimating. One approach I cover is the Delphi Technique. (See last month’s post on what this is) Usually I just talk about it in theory, but this time round I’d decided, with some trepidation, to see if [...]

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Agile Project Ideas from Extreme Programming

November 13, 2009

Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software development approach invented by Kent Beck in the late 90’s. It has many ideas for managing projects that could be useful in other industries.
Sit Together
Teams work better if they sit together in a shared space. This aids communication on a project.
Whole Team
Include in the team all the skills [...]

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