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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
What criteria do you use to accept a deliverable? Have you ever even thought about it? I recommend applying more scrutiny to whether a deliverable is complete when closing a task. Here are criteria for deciding whether to accept a deliverable and close project tasks. Deliverables have been produced and can be reviewed. You can’t […]
We usually don’t get to pick all of our team members. When you can, focus on individuals’ characteristics that will, when combined, give you the best possible team. Here are five key traits for a successful project team. The ideal mix of skills. Every project team needs the proper mix of technical and business skills. […]
In a recent survey, AI in project management was my readers’ top topic to explore further. AI’s benefits are often highlighted, so let’s look at potential pitfalls using AI in project management. For an ironic twist, I asked an AI tool to identify the five most significant traps. Beyond best practice — required practice! Any […]
Project team members come with diverse personalities. Let’s look at how to take advantage of different personalities and their work preferences throughout your project. Important! As project managers, we might assume a person’s personality limits their abilities. For example, extroverts like to talk, but they‘re still able to actively listen to stakeholders. Be careful not […]
A big challenge in project estimating is dealing with the requestor! Leaders often have a number in mind. They might want you to deliver an unachievable objective or expect an unreasonable level of accuracy. Here are a few techniques to handle a challenging estimate requestor. Point out unknowns. Because projects are unique, they include things […]
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