PMcrunch

Management styles Almost everyone makes numerous decisions every day. It is these decisions that allow us to manage our lives, enabling us to do the things we want to do, while working with and around: other people, time and the everyday problems which always seem to occur.

[Read more →]

Looking at lessons learned from the current economic crisis, one that stands out pertains to how people are incentivized in business. Banks with risky loan portfolios somewhere along the line had incentivized their people to fill their portofolios with these loans. Somewhere along the line, the incentives did not incorporate some of the risks involved. How does this play out in project and program management?

[Read more →]

Some projects are very well defined but others are not. If there is an idea that has been handed down by many, formed into a project that simply needs to be implemented, you may have a well defined project. If, on the other hand, someone or some group has an idea and they simply created a project out of it, then you may have an extra amount of defining to do.

[Read more →]

Tough challenges demand detailed analysis and affective decision-making. However, almost always it takes time to turn around a bad situation. While we all know that it will take time for the worldwide economic turmoil to iron itself out, recent stock market surges demonstrate and the reaction of investors to those surges illustrate how mindsets can be changed almost overnight.

[Read more →]

Oftentimes, less experienced project managers and project teams wallow in uncertainty and lack of direction due to the lack of proper project management documentation. I have seen situations where there are lots of desperate sources of documentation but the specific project at hand is not well enough to find.

[Read more →]

Invariably, the same projects are defined later by people describing things that they worked on and activities that they did. What is missing many times are key deliverables.

[Read more →]

These tough times are different from past recessions in that “visibility is low”. What I mean by that is that it is not just a matter of seeing that sales had declined a certain amount, or that certain costs had reached a certain amount; it is not just that there is a general slimming or pruning of weaker competitors across the board. The problem is that it is very hard to predict with any reasonable level of certainty what is going to happen next and, thus, we find ourselves driving through our challenges “with low visibility”.

[Read more →]

Change and pain are interrelated in a couple of ways. First, I think we have all heard many times over that change can be painful. On the other hand, oftentimes, change requires pain. Pursuing this idea a little further, oftentimes people are not willing to change unless they are experiencing enough pain. How can we leverage this idea on our projects and programs?

[Read more →]

When preparing for any certification exam such as the PMP or CAPEM, we need to evaluated our readiness in taking the exam. There are many ways to do this but one is the application of a unique framework for evaluating our cognitive or level of mastery of the material. Let’s take a look.

[Read more →]

Networking, to me, is a fun thing to do. Over time I have gotten to meet many people, many different situations — and I love learning about what people do, how they think, what they have experienced, and what their perspective is. However, what I’ve also found is that the approach that you take to networking can bring about very different results from another approach. Let’s take a look at this topic.

[Read more →]