I know this site can get confusing from time to time. I genuine apologize for that. But an ever increasing number of Project Managers is doing an increasing amount of projects effecting many peoples lives. So what we do matters. We need to know what we are doing. We need to know our Project-Management-Self.

Photography by GhostBoy.

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that you can create a balance between plan-driven and agile approaches. You also know that humans need to categorize everything just to make sense of the world. When combining the two statements together, it will become obvious that "plan-driven" and "agile" are also some arbitrary concept created by humans to support the limited mind. There is no natural law defining "agile", there is no eternal balance putting each of them on the extremes of some kind of scale.
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Dear Craig,

I am an big fan of your blog. You seem to know some amazing stuff I have no clue about. You know Business Analysis, so please tell me…

Why is it that my specifications keep on changing?

Would be nice to create a plan that doesn't get wrecked by changing specs for once.

Cheers
Bas

Bas and Craig have a weekly conversation, back and forth on their respective blogs, Project Shrink and Better Projects. With blog titles like that, you don't have to guess what the topic will be.

CSOdessa will release their project management tool ConceptDraw Office in a couple of weeks (latest word is mid June). No, this is not just another piece of PM software. And that is a good thing. If you provide the Project Management world with new tools, you better bring something cool to the table.

ConceptDraw innovates in two areas: 1) supporting the process from idea to schedule and 2) visual representation.

Idea To Schedule

The application lets you draw mindmaps around certain themes. If you need to build some piece of software you can just think of all the steps you need to perform and mindmap it on the screen. This mindmap can be enhanced by entering dates, resources and slowly turned into a Gantt chart, a real genuine schedule. With this approach it truly reflects the real world planning process. We all hate to send a half-baked draft MS Project file. Well, ConceptDraw will have none of that. Just communicate the mindmap and there will be no false expectations.
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A great post yesterday at Emotional Intelligence for PMs: "People Skills - Not So Important to Project Managers". It reminded me that I needed to answer this particular question more in detail.

Why are soft skills essential for Project Managers?

Photography by From A Second Story.

You all know I just keep on rambling about this issue until no one ever wonders about that question again. That might take a while.

Let’s forget all the current globalization and mobilization for a moment. Just go back to what Project Management is all about. It is the management of scarce resources towards a defined goal using a temporary organizational structure (that’s my current definition).
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You decide to outsource your software development to some far away exotic country. Why use some local cocky programmer that costs a fortune and only gives you an attitude when you instruct him something simple to do? "Go Far, Go Cheap" seems like a good alternative. But, what if you are not the very trusty kind of person? How can you make sure that after forking over 100.000 Euro you will get your stuff?

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