Good Project Management Can Advance Your Career

It seems that all the skills that employers are looking for are accumulated in the Project Management profession. Rock on!

Project Management and Project Leadership

"It means that project managers should manage first and lead only when its their turn. Let the team members take leadership roles when its their time."

That's an interesting thought.

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

This video looks interesting…

"Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and … all disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences."

Can any one provide me with a summary?

Hit The Customer Or Programmer

To release the tension of the day, play this flash game to either hit the customer very hard, or slap the sh*$^& out of a programmer.

Some Easy PM Links

A nice list of links to easy articles about Project Management.

I read an interesting discussion about what makes a Project Manager outstanding? After reading this, I still hold my position that I am holding for many years now : a Project Manager should make every stakeholder happy. Including the PM self. The better a person can reach this goal, the better Project Manager he is. Being able to achieve this, a person needs very good "soft skills", not only pure communication, but also the ability to get into other peoples "worlds", understanding why they operate the way they do. And although this is a controversial topic, for software projects, the PM should have a good knowledge about the underlying technology. Otherwise effective communication becomes more difficult; it is an additional handicap when a different (in this case technical) language is used.

Well, that is just my summary. Take a cup of coffee and read the entire discussion.

I am currently preparing an introduction for IT people in PM methods. While struggling to come up with a way to provide a fast overview of a method, I came up with the following: the four mechanisms of PM methods. A short description of how these mechanisms function within a certain method, works quite well as a fast introduction.

Decisions: A project is a game of trade offs. There is always a need to balance resources, money and time towards certain goals. Because nothing is unlimited, because you are dealing with scarce resources decisions have to be made for which purpose resources are allocated. A method provides a mechanism to make those decisions.

End Result: The goal of a project is to solve a problem or to take an opportunity. There is a reason why a project is performed in the first place. With all decisions that have to be made, with all the changes in the environment that take place a method provides a mechanism to keep the eye on the price, to keep a project pointing to a certain direction.

Resilience: "Change" is a projects middle name. Uncertainties and changing certainties are the environment in which project have to operate. That is just inherent to the nature of projects. How a project deals with changes, how it absorbs or adapts to uncertainties and shifting targets is a major component of the method.

Tailoring: Not all situations are created equal. Different circumstances make different projects. What is effective and desired in one situation may be complete irrelevant and harmful in other situations. A method will provide a mechanism to tailor the method itself to the circumstances.

Opinion: The Agility Factor

Those IT professionals and vendors that decide that agility is not their strength are going to be doing business not with end-user businesses, but with IT utilities.

10 Really Good Reasons to Become a Female in IT!

It is really the curse of our profession: the lack of female colleagues. Last project I did had more female team members than I have ever seen in a project. Was a lot of fun. Girls are only mean to each other. Those creatures can be vicious. So, promote this article for equality of the gender representation in our field.

15 Ways to Be a Good Boss

Shocker for some managers: they are all human related! Eek.

The Toxic Colleagues

Real live story about how colleague can make you almost hate your job.

Hunt for project management software - The end, almost

Last time we linked to the first two episodes about a companies quest to new project management software. Well, in this post they found it.

Minimise Your Project Management Documentation

The curse of the inexperienced project manager is that she believes that her goal is to bombard the customer and the project team with mountains of paperwork equivalent to a small rain forest.

I get all chocked up if people finally get it… snif.

Seth Godin has created a list of business cliches, language you hear to often in companies. It inspired me to the image below.

You know any PM cliches?