Project Management – This Week That Was

Project Management Terms

TechRepublic has listed IT project management terms that you should be aware of if you are dealing with IT consultants or interacting with IT project management professionals. Some of these terms are Earned Value, Project Definition (Charter), Gantt Chart, Issue, Critical Path, Cost Variance, project manager, Schedule Variance, RFP, RFQ, project Risk, project scope, project scope change management, risk management, stakeholder management; even agile project management terms like scrum, spring, release, story points, user stories, etc are covered. You can read more project management terms.

Project Management Report by City AM

London business newspaper City A.M. has published a project management report that highlights some of the recent trends in project management such as

Ø Professional project management approach translates into successful projects. The business leaders with right training reduce the business risk. Beside having such professionals, organizations should also support them for effective execution and expected outcome

Ø Though there are many ‘accidental’ project management professionals, there can be flipside of e.g. people moving away from ‘an engineer’ to be a project manager that being project management professional requires different set of skillset, mindset. And to be effective project management professional requires investing your time and requires aligned experience.

Ø The major reasons of project management failure are

o No clear understanding of objective, outcome or even necessity of project management change

o Lack of closer communication with project stakeholders; right amount of buy-in from different stake-holders like sponsors, users, etc.

o Not being brave, objective enough to call it quit or not able to say NO to sinking boat

You can read more in this report about project management

Top 7 Wishes of IT Project Managers

In an article at CIO, Jennifer Lonoff Schiff has enlisted top seven wishes of IT project managers such as

Ø Being able to hold on to right skilled team from one project to another

Ø Get involved into the project, right from the beginning

Ø To be able to use simple but powerful project management software

Ø To have clear project requirements and expected project deliverable

Ø To get buy-in from project sponsors and end users

Explore more for the top seven wishlist of project managers.

Few picks from Project Management Podcasts

I came across few project management podcast and could be of interest to you as well.

Ø Gower Handbook of People in Project Management: ARRAS People author Lindsay Scott has shared a guide to the human aspects in project management – with information about project management roles such as sponsor, planner, manager, executor, etc. and their contribution to projects’ success. You can listen to this podcast where Lindsay talks about first three chapters.

Ø Agile and Portfolio Project Management (Part-I): David Blumhorst in this podcast talks about agile integration into overall Project Portfolio Management framework is no different than integrating a traditional project methodology, barring four exceptions. You can listen to this podcast here.