Currently I am tracking 90 blogs related to Project Management. Last month I found these ten postings highly remarkable and interesting:

It's the sociology, telecommuters
Silos & Empires
The Emerging and Strange Alliance Between Boomers and Millennials
7 Reasons for the Rapid Growth of Project Management in IT
Engaging middle management in “Enterprise 2.0?
The Difference Difference Makes
Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers
Do We Learn From Our Mistakes?
Women In Management: Shirts or Skirts - Who's The Better Manager?
Middle-Management Crisis Escalates

You can get my daily recommendations of great postings by subscribing to this RSS feed:
http://www.softwareprojects.org/reader

Read this for more information.

Craig Brown writes a blog at BetterProjects.net. Craig and I are regular readers of each other’s sites and now we are having a conversation from site to site.

Dear Craig,

Of course, we do need more than training alone to improve Project Managers and everyone else involved in projects. From the top of my head: "discipline". You can train as much as you like, but if you drop everything you learned the moment things are getting a little tough, there is no use. Especially in PM, it is tempting to cut corners on documentation, taking minutes and communication in general, when the pressure is on. But we all know that the first things we drop, were supposed to avoid the bad situation in the first place. So, if you ask me what more is needed, that would be my first answer.

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It has been almost ten months since I outlined my last model of Project Management. The importance of having some kind of mental image about projects and Project Management may not come as a surprise. We are long due for an update on how I think everything links together.

Photography by Elvire R.

People Operating In A Group

Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor they laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.
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There is no Iron Triangle in Project Management. In PM we learn the holy trinity of the triple constraint, the concept that we are operating within borders, and that those borders are interdependent. Oh yeah, and "triple" or "triangle" indicates that there are three. Although the image is powerful to instruct, it is plain false. There are more than three types of constraints. Environmental, law, physical to name just a few in addition to things like time and money.

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Different project circumstances require different approaches to ensure optimum effectiveness. As mentioned over and over again on this blog, it is the people who largely determine these circumstances, and you have to tailor your project approach to the particular situation. For this you can make use of techniques and tools from different existing methods by simply mixing and matching everything together in such a way that you brew the right Project Potion for the occasion.

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It's time for a reader suggestion thread and today's question is:

What is the best advice you can give to project managers supervising offshore development projects?

Please place a comment with your tip on managing offshore development. It might be the importance of communication; it might be the need for bridging cultural differences. Don't hold back.

As a little incentive I will give an ebook version of my book "Surprise! Now You're A Software Project Manager" to the most original entry (so make sure you include your email address in the comment box - closing of entries is July 1st). Sorry, closed.