Entries by Bonnie Biafore

Prevent Pseudo-Stakeholders from Hurting Your Project

People who think they’re stakeholders but aren’t waste your time and distract your project team. Early on, you need to address these pseudo-stakeholders, so they don’t eat up your time and resources. This Project Pointer provides approaches to identify them and reduce their impact on your project. Hold public consultations. After meeting with identified stakeholders, […]

Want to Expand Your Skills? Use Your Network!

Conferences and courses can help expand your skills and enhance your project management career. There are other ways to increase your abilities as part of your everyday job. Check out these ways to increase your skills by using your network. Swap project reviews. A fresh set of eyes can spot weaknesses, flaws, or risks you […]

What Domain Knowledge is Needed to Manage a Project?

A project manager doesn’t have to be an expert in a project’s domain area to serve as PM. But they must possess some domain knowledge to be effective. Here is the general domain knowledge needed to manage a project. Processes and regulations. Domain areas have specific approaches to work and standards that must be understood. […]

Focus on Project Goals

Long-term goals are what projects are all about. Daily project challenges make it difficult to keep focus on those goals. Here are tips to help you keep your eye on the prize of successful project completion. Use two goal definitions. The first set of project goal definitions needs to be relatable to your stakeholders to […]

Just Enough Project Reporting

Lots of detailed and overwhelming project reports drain stakeholders’ confidence. Too few reports are even worse. How do you know when you produce the right number of reports at the right level of detail? Here are some indicators that you’ve hit the right amount of project reporting. Positive stakeholder feedback. Positive feedback from stakeholders is […]

Lesser-known Benefits of Quality Management

Quality management is about ensuring your deliverables meet the expectations of stakeholders: meeting standards, performance and reliability business needs. But quality management delivers extra benefits you don’t often hear about:  Enhanced stakeholder buy-in. Quality management requires a deeper grasp of stakeholder needs and expectations. That understanding comes from better conversations and learning about stakeholder’s challenges […]

Alleviate Team Member Stress

Project work isn’t for the meek. Pressure comes from management, stakeholders, and acute business needs and the resulting stress reduces team members’ performance. Helping your team alleviate their stress improves their performance and increases their loyalty to the project. Here are ways to decrease stress in your project environment. Recognize people’s emotions. You might hear […]

Project Review vs. Project Audit

During your career as a project manager, you might endure people poking through one of your projects, looking for things to improve. There are two typical approaches for this: a project review and a project audit. The differences are important, because a project manager needs to behave differently for each of these improvement initiatives. A […]

Avoiding Traps in Technical Project

Projects involving technology are challenging for project managers. But it’s rarely the technology that presents the challenges. Here are ways to avoid common traps that trip up PMs leading projects with technical components. Projects are really about business processes. Projects to deploy technology typically produce two things: increased productivity and/or reduced cost. What delivers these […]

Embracing an Agile Mindset

Adopting agile methodologies successfully requires the right mindset. For this iterative and adaptive approach to thrive, you need to embrace the following elements and characteristics.  Speed and experience. Agile produces outcomes quickly, but that speed comes at a cost. You need dedicated experienced people on the team to produce quality outcomes and you need management […]