Project Hero Blog - Weekly Best Practices and Tips

[Note: Beginning with last week's article and continuing forward, in addition to tagging articles with knowledge areas, we will be adding new tags for business, people, and technical (including process). We will update past articles over time. This will align content with the new PMP®​​ exam content areas, which in turn, align with the PMI talent triangle areas - Leadership, Technical Project Mana...

Management skills are usually grouped into several categories, including interpersonal, technical, and conceptual. But time management skills go beyond attributes that simply make you an effective leader. Knowing how to manage your minutes is crucial to the success of your business and your personal life. Here are a few examples of skills to refine that will have a positive impact on your time man...

Whether you have a predictive or agile project, you will always need to have the team on the same page and satisfy the client.  Today, we're going to look at the two best ways to get team and client buy in.  Involvement and clarity are two of the best ways to obtain buy-in.

Involvement: The #1 Tool for Buy-in

Let's suppose you developed a course.  If you were asked to approve the course, you would...

There are four important tools a project manager can use to improve communications. These four critical tools are the elevator pitch, status report, project deck, and communication plan.  Let's take a detailed look at each of these one at a time.

Elevator Pitch: Your elevator pitch is a concise and compelling message about your project. It should start with an attention-grabbing opener or headlin...

It's been said that project managers spend 90% of their time communicating.  This isn't just talking.  It's about communicating in many different forms, such as reports, presentations, meetings with groups and individuals, emails, social media posts, and more.

So to start, let's look at what communication is through a relatively simple model. Communications involve a sender and a receiver. The se...

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

- Peter Drucker

Rather than wait for your project management future, if you are planning to pursue a career, get started now and create it.  Here are five tips you can use to predict the high quality of that future:

1. Have a clear vision for every project and the team, and communicate it to all stakeholders.  Add to this clarity of roles and r
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No matter what project management methods or project life cycles you are using, risk management is an important component.  While there may be some nuances for different circumstances, some elements are universal.

It's important to note that risk is unavoidable - no environment is completely risk free. But do scale your efforts accordingly.  A very complex project, projects with large budgets and...

Whether you are a project manager or a scrum master, if you are leading an agile project, there are some critical things to keep in mind.  Some of these we have covered in past articles and some of them are new. Here are seven tips for agile project managers.  Repetition helps to build retention, so even if these seem old, think of them as new :)

1. Respect client deliverables.  For agile projects
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The first month of a new year has already past - time flies by!  Perhaps as part of your New Year's resolutions you have decided to acquire new skills or take your career in a different direction.  Now is a great time to get started with project management.

Just a few years ago, Project Management Institute Research showed that there would be a need for around 22m new project managers within the ...

COVID-19 has brought about a lot of change; however, some things remain constant.  In a more competitive environment, with constant change and fewer available resources, the skill of project management is now as important as ever. Projects must be more successful and deliver on their promised value to help organizations realize their strategies.  One of the unique benefits of employing good projec...