Project Hero Blog - Weekly Best Practices and Tips
Project Management for Aspiring, New, and Accidental PMs
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Improving your leadership skills will help you, as well as the team, grow and advance in your careers.
- Coach and mentor, rather than direct. Give trust to the team to get the job done, remove obstacles for them, and empower them to solve problems.
- Create a culture of learning and continuous improvement. Eliminate silos, share knowledge, and collaborate.
- Identify growth paths for all on your...
Improving your project management skills will help your professional and personal growth, and increase your value to your organization. Here are 5 tips for improving your project management skills:
- Adopt a mindset of continuous improvement. Learn from past successes and mistakes and make changes for the next project.
- Improve your communication skills. Communication, including effective...
Here are five common mistakes project managers make, and tips on how to avoid them:
- React to variance: One week of variation, unless huge, is not going to make or break a project. Better: Look for trends, and don't forget that being under budget and time has consequences as well.
- Insufficient planning: Top PMs spend more time planning than less effective PMs. Better: Allow some work to start...
Studies have shown that roughly 20% of projects fail due to poor communications. Whether you are discussing risk management or just having a meeting, having strong communication skills is critical for project managers. Here are 5 tips for improving those skills:
- Know your audience. Do a thorough stakeholder analysis to understand communications needs and preferences.
- Develop a formal...
As we've learned from projects like healthcare.gov, Agile isn't always the best method to follow for software development. If we look at its strengths and weaknesses, Agile is not especially well-suited in its pure form for projects with fixed deadlines and fixed scope. It also exhibits limitations in complex projects which require strong integration testing. So there are other...
Another tip from my new book, Risk Assessment Framework: Successfully Navigating Uncertainty, with publication planned for November. Watch for more details in October.
Following a robust and appropriately scaled risk management process provides important project benefits, including:
- Positive risks (opportunities) can have positive outcomes: for example, shortened schedules or effective...
If project management feels like it's herding cats, you are probably doing something wrong. Here are 5 steps to avoid the cats:
- Be sure you develop a definition of success and a clear vision with the project sponsor.
- Be sure there are clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
- Do enough planning, so there is a clear plan for the team to follow.
- Follow the appropriate project and...
How much risk management and risk management planning is enough? There is no immediate answer to this question; however, a good starting point is to consider the following objectives and constraints:
- Costs and time of implementing risk management are proportionate to the costs and time of the projects -less than 10% is a...
1) Be sure there is a project...
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