What happens once you’ve passed the PMP exam? Keeping up with 60 Pofesionnal Development Units (PDUs) every 3 years can seem like a daunting task.
I’ve written a post about just that on Josh Nankievel’s blog, pmtsudent.
Enjoy!
From the part of the person who gives it, trust is hard. It requires a leap of faith. It requires that we believe the person we trust is worth it.
From the part of the person who receives it, trust is energizing. It means that someone was willing to take that leap of faith for us. It means we are worth it. Trust also carries responsibility: if we want to keep that trust, we must prove the giver right. This means delivering on that trust.
Project management requires a high level of trust
In a nutshell, the project team must trust each other. That includes the project manager, the team, the stakeholder and the sponsors. For most of us, […]
Leadership is much more than a skill. While we may learn to tailor how we communicate with others to influence them to follow us, can we really learn a personality trait?
What is leadership?
Leadership can be seen in two ways:
While learning to influence others is a skill that can be learned, it feels a lot like manipulation to me. Leaders that use manipulation consciously to get people to do what they want seem dishonest to me.
I think true leaders hold a deep belief in their cause or goal, a belief that is infectious. They don’t need to convince or manipulate others to follow them in their projects. People want to follow them. That’s natural leadership.
While leadeship skills may be learned, natural leadership cannot
Natural leadership is a personality trait. It requires personal conviction, self-confidence and extroversion. Think about the natural […]
Since blogs are online, I thought it would be fitting to begin reviewing eBooks. This time, I’ll tell you about “Getting Started in Project Management” by Josh Nankivel.
Josh is the founder of pmStudent.com, a website dedicated to those learning the skill of project management – a skill we may never be finished learning! pmSutdent is set apart from all the other learning-oriented sites for project managements, who are usually focused on PMP certification, and little else beyond that. With pmStudent, the focus is on learning, and getting certified is a subject secondary to that.
Josh wrote “Getting Started in Project Management” to help others getting started with project management, basically to provide a resource he would have liked to have when he got started in 2004.
The book is divided in two parts. In the first half, Josh tells his own journey into project management, from his last lay off in 2004, until he was asked to lead a major project in the aerospace business. This was an interesting read, especially where he writes […]
There are two schools of thought with project management tools: project management OR collaboration.
Why should project teams have two tools, one for project management and one for collaboration? Shouldn’t both these uses be united in one tool?
Project management is not about secrecy, quite the contrary. It’s about sharing information with everyone who needs it. Project management is about getting your team to work together to achieve results.
When using a collaborative project management system, you not only share information on the project with the team, your stakeholders and even your clients, you also get to share the burden to updating project information with your team. Instead of the project manager being the only one updating task statuses and entering time sheet data, it’s everyone in the team who does. The project manager simply double-checks and approves the updates.
Not only does it save tremendous amounts of time, it also empowers the team. It gives the team members responsibility towards the project, beyond their assigned work.
We think a lot about schedules and costs and quality when planning a
project, but do we spend enough time thinking about our project team?
When's the last time you thought about you team's happiness?
I worte an article for Project Management Tipoff's May editiion, about the importance of human resources in your project.
I went fishing last weekend. It was a beautiful (yet a little cold) weekend in the woods. We were on a good lake for fishing: our quota was 15 catches per person. That’s a lot of fish!
We were thinking: if the outfitter allows 15 catches per person, there’s got to be a lot of fish in this lake. And there was. As we arrived the Friday night, we could see the bass jump at flies on the surface of the lake. We were stoked for a good day of bass fishing on Saturday!
Well, it was not a good day of fishing. We caught a total of 10 fish between the three of us. This was underwhelming.
Here’s why we didn’t get the fish we were hoping for
We’ve had our Linkedin profile for while now, but we were not very active on the network until a few months ago. That’s when we discovered Linkedin Groups. We signed on for project-management related groups. The discussions on Linkedin groups are insightful, interesting, and go deeper than those on Twitter.
On Linkedin, we are all individuals, not the companies we represent. We become part of the community. And this is a much more powerful sales tool than one would expect. At first, it may seem like a big investment in time, that yields no direct sales.
This is not true.
Linkedin is about people. And people need tools and products in their lives. Guess who people will listen to when they are looking to buy something? Their network. It’s simple really.
And the great thing is it really works. I follow and contribute to Linkedin groups when I feel relevant to do so. I am not pushing anyone or spamming groups to promote AceProject. However, when someone is looking for project management software, I’ll tell them about […]
Last week at the Webcom conference, the big buzzword was open: open networking, open mesh, open social, open products, etc.
The era of the Web 2.0 is over. It’s now the Web ME.0. ME.0 is about the individual. Not the products. Not the technologies. Not the businesses.
The people.
And those people are not interested in remembering 15 different passwords, or recreating 15 diffierent profiles on 15 different sites and products. Already, we’re seeing most sites using the email address as the username to log in. We’re seeing initiatives like OpenSocial getting attention from the likes of Google and Yahoo. We’re seeing more and more products opening their databases via APIs. We’re seeing more products designed to centralize social network updating.
Businesses are making their products easier to use, instead of locking their customers in.
Everyone wants an open product, an open platform and an open relationship with their suppliers and clients.
Open is THE online business and technology trend this year, just like green is THE brick-and-mortar business trend this year.
Project management is a big world. With the PMI’s PMBOK running at 400 pages or so, it can be challenging to keep up with methodologies. Even more challenging is keeping up the practice of closing projects well. It’s easy to sign-off on the work and to do the administrative closure stuff, but building good, usable project achives is harder. It takes time, and the value of this time is not seen in the short term.
I recently attended a conference from Laurent Bellavance, the director of Rimouski‘s economic promotion society. His role is to facilitate the projects: he puts together the local governments, specialists and investors to create innovation and prosperity in his city. Bellavance has been in his post for about a year. One of his challenges is to get information on past projects. While the other directors who preceded him at the head of his organization can still be reached if needed, they are focussed on other goals and do not always remember the specifics of projects that […]