The Project Management Academy Blog
Get the latest industry news, trends and insights you need to be the most effective Project Manager.
The Daily Stand-Up or Stand-Up is baked into Agile, with the team gathering every day for a focused review of tasks. The daily team meeting is by no means limited to those formally practicing an Agile methodology, project teams across industries hold them. A time to connect with each other, to refocus on the immediate work ahead, to recognize recent success, and to address current barriers; the daily team meeting or Stand-Up is a go-to tool for project managers.
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I’ve delivered a number of presentations this year on the importance of building psychological safety within project teams and the role which project managers play. During these presentations I’m frequently asked the question “How do I go about creating it?“. While there are existing models such as Timothy R. Clark’s progressive four stage model, a simple three step approach which I support is to Plan It, Live It and Champion It. I will cover these steps within my upcoming articles.
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How a business is structured can impact efficiencies, and Project Managers need deep understanding of the organizational structure to successfully realize the best project outcomes. A common model is the “matrixed” organization, in which employees have both departmental and functional managers. In a matrixed organizational structure, an employee has a primary manager plus one or more project managers they work under, and skills are the driving factor. To understand matrix, you must also know of the “functional” approach in which employees are organized by the work output type, such as marketing, R&D, and finance. It is possible to have a hybrid organization with both matrix and functional structures. Matrix vs. Functional Organizational Structure If you are familiar with the 1999 movie “The Matrix,” the protagonist Neo is given a choice of the red pill or the blue pill and learning more about the reality of his existence. Project Managers may not be saving all of humanity from an evil software program like Neo, but they do need to make choices and navigate complicated situations. You need to know the different in matrix and functional organizations because it directly impacts how project teams are formed, supported, and work is tracked.
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While there are many cases where we might have to use our powers of influence and persuasion to sell stakeholders on supporting what we feel is the right thing, I thought I’d share three specific examples which might be a much harder sell than usual.
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Professional Development | Project Management
Regardless of your company or industry, 2020 changed lives and careers. For Project Managers, the challenges of guiding a team through work processes are now heavily impacted by changes in team member’s personal environment in addition to changes in the business. To navigate 2021, Project Managers must balance management and leadership skills, and know when to apply either or both.
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A question which I’m asked regularly during my classes is what the best place is to start an agile transformation within a company? Given a choice, I’d prefer to use the cop-out (but correct) answer “It depends”, but otherwise I usually respond that you’d want to do both a top-down and bottom-up approach simultaneously.
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Continuing Education | Project Management | Training and Development
After deciding to invest in your professional development, you can maximize your investment by setting yourself up for successful comprehension of the course content by improving how you take notes during your class. Your personal note taking style, the format in which you take notes and what you do with those notes, can have a direct impact on how much you gain from a training. In fact, the >act of taking notes can increase the chance of remembering the information by as much as 34%, in contrast to a mere 5% chance of remembering without note taking.
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Professional Development | Project Management
What is LinkedIn LinkedIn is a network founded in 2002 with a focus on career development, job advancement, and professional networking. It’s power of influence is supported by the $26.2 billion price tag Microsoft paid for it in 2016. Unlike Facebook, Instagram or other social networks, Linked is an “employment-related social network” offering members professional profiles, supported by job postings, job applications, company profiles, and networking.
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Business Analysis | Project Management
Are you one of the 1,000,000+ Project Management Professionals (PMP)® who are thinking about your next career development move to stay fresh, keep current, reinvent yourself, or just refine your knowledge in a professional area of interest? That’s good. Because this is not the time to let your skills stagnate and there are so many opportunities for enhancing your value proposition in the project economy!
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Teams that seek to deliver quality, tested deliverables in as short a timeframe as possible are likely already using Agile practices even if they do not know it. The Agile Project Management framework in fact leverages practices that are so common that they do not have an “origin” story, such as prioritization, stand-up meetings, and visual management of tasks. However, the formal Agile Project Management has become tightly connected to software development and projects within the Information Technology (IT) space. When considering whether to “go Agile,” it’s important to understand Agile Project Management as a methodology and in a business context.
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