The discipline of project management is constantly evolving and maturing. Recent changes to the PMI Talent Triangle categories reflects this fact. PMI first introduced the Talent Triangle in 2015. The concept behind the talent triangle, was to help build recognition that, to be successful, in addition to technical project management skills (understanding scheduling, costing, risk,… Read More
Helping team members avoid the fears of working remotely
HBR (Harvard Business Review) recently published an article titled Managing your WFH paranoia. In the article, the author focuses on the impacts of the “out of sight, out of mind” concerns which many workers have developed over the course of the past year resulting from COVID-19 pandemic work restrictions. Such fears could include a sense of… Read More
How do you hold safe meetings when some team members are invisible?
After presenting on how to build psychologically safe virtual teams at a conference in November, one of the delegates asked me what suggestions I’d have to help her with a team where some of the members refused to turn their cameras on during video meetings.
Sink or Swim – How in 3 weeks we transformed our service delivery model
On March 17th, the Premier of Ontario declared a state of emergency in Ontario and ordered most business to be closed in order to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus. At that time, all the project management training and consulting services offered by WCP (except for Microsoft Project related training), were only available in-person. The highly interactive, scenario based, and hands-on nature of our project management workshops, did not (we had always assumed) make them conducive to virtual training.
Let’s bust an agile myth: Sprinting is agile
If the only agile framework you have been exposed to is Scrum, you could be forgiven for thinking that to be agile you must organize your work into sprints.
After all, agile delivery is incremental and iterative and a sprint is just a short iteration, right?
To escalate or not to escalate? That is the Question!
A review of troubled projects reveals that the inability of the project manager or team to appropriately escalate decisions or issues is a common contributor to failure.
Seven Deadly Project Manager Sins
In spite of an increased focus on competency in PM conferences, journals and online knowledge sources, organizations continue to experience project failures at the hands of incapable PMs. Identifying common negative behaviors that can contribute to these failures might be the first step towards recovery: Communication imbalance – communication consumes a significant percentage of a… Read More
Should you hire a contract PM? It depends…
Most organizations with titled project managers rarely have enough capacity to handle peak staffing situations. While some of the excess project demand could be managed by functional managers or other senior staff, there may still be one or more projects of sufficient complexity to demand the services of a professional project manager. Faced with such… Read More
Seven deadly sins of scheduling
Something I’ve taken for granted is a project manager’s ability to create and maintain a project schedule. The reality is that most “accidental” project managers spend at least as much time struggling with their schedules as they do getting real value out of them. No project scheduling tool is inherently bad, but there are a… Read More
I may be a “Crazy Fool” but I consider the A-Team to be agile!
When teaching agile classes, I’m occasionally asked if I could provide an example of an agile team from cinema or television. While the first Avengers movie does a good job of illustrating Bruce Tuckman’s stages of team development (especially storming!), they are far from being agile. The example I most frequently provide is that quintessential… Read More