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Any complex project that a company undertakes has a better chance of achieving its goal, vision and the desired results if team executing the project employs both the science and art of project management.

The science you can learn and apply, because there are many courses, books, tools, techniques and software packages out there that help you understand how to manage your project from a methodological perspective. Learning the art of project management on the other hand is a different story, because it takes experience to know what you need to do, when you need to do it and how much of it to apply to a given situation.

Luckily for us, there are a lot of experienced project managers out there who are willing to share their experience and Vijayalakshmi Muthukrishnan, PMP (http://in.linkedin.com/pub/vijayalakshmi-muthukrishnan/12/49a/575) is one of them. She has worked as a project manager in both the USA and India. In support of the projects in her company she created a presentation of the 10 things that every PM should know & do. We review each item in her presentation and you will not only hear her explain why each of them is crucial as a PM skill, but more importantly she includes her suggestions, tips, tricks and steps on how to apply them properly.

All that remains to do for you is... well.. do them!

Click here to download the PDF...
These are the 10 recommendations from Vijayalakshmi Muthukrishnan in PDF form.

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This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam:

A little over a year ago I decided that I wanted to take a preparation course for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® Exam. I looked around and found a company that held a course in San Diego, which is about an hour away. I signed up and was sorely disappointed by the low quality training materials the class used. The only two good things about the class were the teacher who managed to keep it interesting despite the not so well designed curriculum and that I made a few new friends.

(Note: The company that provided this training to us took the negative feedback they received seriously and have updated & improved the training in the meantime.)

About a month ago one of these friends wrote and said that he had just passed his PMI-ACP exam. His name is Felix Rodgers, PMI-ACP (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/felix-rodgers/48/579/b) and I jumped at the opportunity to interview him about how he went from that classroom experience to actually passing the exam.

And this is what I liked about his experience: We often hear from certified project managers that they had also taken disappointing classes but still managed to pass their exam. But so far I have never had a chance to speak to someone in that situation. Turns out that for Felix it was hard work and lots of studying.

As you know, the rules of all PMI exams are such that we are not allowed to discuss specific questions from the exam. But we can discuss his overall experience, general thoughts on the process and his recommendations to you. So you can look forward to an experience and tip filled interview on how to prepare for and pass your PMI-ACP Exam.

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This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam:

This is part 2 of our interview with David Blumhorst (http://blogs.daptiv.com/author/davidblumhorst/ - http://www.linkedin.com/in/dblumhorst/) in which we discuss that combining Agile and Project Portfolio Managment is not really that much different than if you used traditional project management approaches.

If you remember, in part 1 we discussed that there are four four exceptions you need to be aware of when integrating Agile with PPM and then we looked at how you need to adjust your PPM framework to include include 5 standard metrics for Agile. They were Scheduled Finish Date and Percent Complete.

Here in part 2 we will move on to the other 3 metrics and then David and I open up the white paper from Daptiv and look at the graphic that clearly shows how straightforward integrating Agile and PPM can be. (A link to download the white paper is on our website. Please grab it from there.)

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This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam:

One of the seemingly larger challenges out there for corporation that use both Agile and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is integration of what seem to be two very different philosophies. But more than that... you will have to overcome three fallacies about Agile and PPM.

The first fallacy is that people think that Agile projects don’t provide executive visibility, the second that they don’t have reliable “Scheduled Finish Dates” and the third that Agile and traditional practices simply aren’t compatible.

David Blumhorst (http://blogs.daptiv.com/author/davidblumhorst/ - http://www.linkedin.com/in/dblumhorst/) begs to differ. He co authored several articles and a white paper on this topic and he outlines a simple and straightforward way to realize the best of both worlds.

This is part 1 of our interview with David. In it we discuss how integrating Agile with into a PPM framework is no different than integrating a more traditional project methodology, but that there are four four exceptions, which we’ll look at in detail. And then we move on to 5 areas of estimation how a PPM framework with standard metrics can be created for Agile. We will talk about the first two, which are Scheduled Finish Date and Percent Complete.