Currently I am tracking 97 blogs related to "Project Management". Last month I found the following postings highly remarkable and interesting…

This month Kimberly Wiefling, author of "Scrappy Project Management", wrote a great series about leadership and project management. I highly recommend every single entry… BUT I just have to highlight two as they really struck a chord.

Photography by Willy Hybrid.

Manage Cows, but LEAD People

"… my organizations were steaming heaps of dysfunctional behavior and inefficiency, and what our official leaders needed to do seemed blindingly obvious. I just couldn’t understand why they were standing around smiling and slapping each other on the back about meeting monthly numbers while smoldering embers of inevitable corporate downfall were poised to burst into flames all around us… It never occurred to me that things looked different from the top of the totem pole. It wasn’t until years later that someone told me that the hierarchy in companies is like a bunch of monkeys sitting in a tall tree. When you look down you just see a bunch of smiling faces, but when you look up…"

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Speed is one of the great enablers of resilience. If you can get feedback fast into your process, you can absorb changes like a vacuum cleaner.

Fast feedback enables resilience.

Photography by fdecomite.

By making use of multiple timezones, you can extend the duration of a "working day". More can be done in a day. And if you do it right, feedback can be available faster.

"Follow The Sun is a type of global workflow in which tasks are passed around daily between sites that are many time-zones apart in order to reduce project duration. Thus, the work is "following the sun" and never stops." (source)

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What do you do when everybody is using "the wrong tools"? Are you going to convince everyone to do it "your way"? Or are you going to tap into the existing information stream and improve the existing stream?

As the words in "Paradise By The Dashboard Lights":

"What is it gonna be, boy?"

Andrew Filev, the CEO of Wrike.com, decided to tap into the existing information flows of projects. In the first part of my conversation with Andrew, he explained how in today's projects you cannot enforce a rigid regime from the top-down, and you cannot let people just do as they please. If you do it purely bottom-up, you can have chaos because there is no alignment. You have to stimulate both to get emerging structures.
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Craig Brown and I are conversing on project management, and in particular professional development. The conversations is across both our blogs.

Dear Craig,

This time I have to explain why I am blogging and why I am yelling "Projects are about humans. Deal with that!" It is the only way I can answer your question in your previous response about project management communities and industry organizations:

"Are you an outsider looking in? Are you an insider selling something?"
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Looking for the right project management software can be a pain. It is really important that you define upfront the goals you are trying to achieve with the introduction of the new software. If you have no budget available, you might want to check out my list of free Project Management software.

Photography by TheBusyBrain.

If you are considering buying a PM application, you can use sites like this for comparison and review.

If you are especially looking for construction project management software, SoftwareAdvice.com might come in handy. Houston Neal explains:
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