Category: Project Management Advice
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IT Project Leaders or Managers?
Who’s Best? And How To Survive Without Either On Your Payroll… Driving home, listening to the radio the other day, the Shangri-Las came on with their classic hit “Leader Of The Pack”. It jumped out at me, not least because of the noisy motorbike sound effects but also because I had been contemplating the value…
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At harvest time what can IT project managers learn from farmers?
I was fascinated this week by a farmer in a combine harvester going up and down in a field adjacent to the road I was driving along. I pulled over to watch … it’s a man and machines thing! The farmer pulled over too and we briefly talked about the vehicle he was driving. I…
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How to Build a Cohesive Team if You’re Not All Office Based
It really wasn’t that long ago that working as a team meant everyone sharing the same office space, or at the very least working in the same location. Now, technological advances have turned that idea upside down. People can easily work on the same project regardless of the country they are based in or whether…
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IT Projects. Do We Actually Ever Learn Lessons Learnt?
Originally published on CIO.com We record ‘lessons learnt’ as part of the project management process but do we actually learn from them? Recent experience and the number of projects that fail to deliver suggest we could probably all do better at learning from lessons learnt. It is worth considering this for a moment … Do…
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7 Reasons why IT Project Managers were born to blog
“You’re so passionate about Project Management, you should write a blog about it,” one of my colleagues said a couple of years back. That’s how it started. I wrote one blog and then, having found it quite enjoyable, I wrote a second and then a third. I got some nice feedback, got shared, had a…
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What Makes the Perfect Project Manager?
Project managers are as diverse a bunch as projects can be themselves. Perfect project managers don’t exist, any more than perfect people do. However, some project managers are undeniably easier to work with, better at what they do and ultimately more successful and in demand. So, what exactly distinguishes these project managers from the rest?…
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Effective Ways To Deal With Poor Performance From a Project Team Member
Discover some effective methods you can use to deal with the poor performance of a project team member . If a member of your project team is not performing to their best, it can create an awkward situation. Not only do you need this team member to start pulling his or her weight, but also…
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Managing IT Projects: Respond Don’t React
In IT Projects, when something unexpected happens, I get better results when I respond, than when I react. You may have sussed this for yourself ages ago but my epiphany, strangely, came when I met a St John Ambulance community first responder. He was telling me about a traffic accident that he’d attended. He was…
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Who needs a PMO?
I was reminded of an old Monty Python sketch today. Did you ever see Life of Brian? One of the characters Reg, played by John Cleese, asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?” One by one, other characters pipe up with loads of suggestions … medicine … roads … public order … Eventually,…
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How to deal with what wasn’t in the IT project handover
Have you ever taken on an IT Project, only to find that a major challenge either wasn’t mentioned in the handover from the departing Project Manager or, if it was, it was implicit – not explicit. It’s like those horror movies where a family buys a house only to find out, after they move in,…