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When it comes to identifying a reason for why so many projects fail then Bryan Barrow (https://nova-consulting.co.uk - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/bryanbarrow) has a simple answer for you. He says that a root cause of poor project delivery is poor planning. But he also says that this is not a failure of project management, but instead this is a failure of project leadership.

So if poor planning is the culprit then there has to be a better way to plan our projects. Right? Right!

Bryan is an advocate of planning your project with index cards. So in our interview we are going to first discuss what the problem is with planning your project using sticky notes, and then we’ll look at the benefits of index card planning for your project, in particular on improved leadership, greater financial control, improved project governance and improved cross-department team-working and collaboration.

And by the way… Bryan Barrow will be speaking on the topic of Index Card Planning on April 29th at the 2014 Project Zone Congress in Frankfurt Germany. So if you are listening to this interview before April 2014 you can find out more at https://projectzonecongress.com/ [Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link]

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A couple of episodes ago we welcomed Todd C Williams and talked about rescuing the problem project. We continue this discussion today with Dr. Emad Rahim, DM, PMP (https://www.linkedin.com/in/erahim, @DrEmadRahim) by looking at how to avoid failure and achieve project success on information technology (IT) projects.

In particular, we discuss the findings on this topic that he and his co-author describe in a white paper, which begins as follows:

Communication and information technology has developed rapidly within the last decade.As a result, project managers must be prepared to manage the current and future challenges within the project management field, as well as within the IT industry. Rapid globalization of business means organizations must significantly increase its capacity to accurately manage information and data. In response to this growing capacity demand, more discussion is needed to develop effective IT project management processes and approaches

Listen to the interview to learn how it's done!

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It’s imperative that you know your project’s stakeholders. After all, to satisfy a stakeholder need is usually the reason why we undertake projects. That’s why we define stakeholders as a person or organization with an interest in the project’s completion. Think of influential customers, sponsors, the public or your own company that are all involved in the project.

Our guest today is Dr. Emad Rahim, DM, PMP (https://www.linkedin.com/in/erahim, @DrEmadRahim) who says that because your stakeholders require you to understand the specifications of a project and to meet their expectations, performing an analysis of who they are is essential.

And so our interview focuses on a single activity: Identifying all the stakeholders we have on the project. This is a time-consuming process, and you want to ensure no important stakeholder is missed. And to help you with that, Emad and Cornelius review eight areas that require your attention.

You can find the blog post about stakeholder identification here: https://www.coloradotech.edu/resources/blogs/january-2013/stakeholders.

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It seemed that in the final weeks of 2013, project management was on everyone’s mind. And not in a good way. The roll-out of the affordable care act website really brought to light that substandard project performance can have a disastrous effect on public perception. While we often hear about failed government projects, failed private sector projects seem to fly under the radar.

In today’s interview we welcome Todd C. Williams (https://ecaminc.com/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/backfromred) has spent the past 25 years advising Fortune 500 companies on what to do about projects that are either headed for a cliff or have already gone over.

We begin the interview by looking at what makes government projects uniquely susceptible to a higher failure rate than private sector projects and then move into seven steps that Todd recommends for recovering a troubled project.

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Happy New Year! This is a short notice to all listeners to let you know what's happening to The PM Podcast and our website: Over the coming 2-3 weeks we are going to be completely redeploying our website. After that Cornelius is heading out the door to Philadelphia, Sydney and Manila. We do have a few interviews recorded (they will be published as soon as the new website is up) and we have some interviews scheduled for recording after he returns from his trip. So we should be back to "normal programming" starting March.

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This interview with Dave Cornelius was recorded at the Southland Technology Conference 2013 in Long Beach. It is, however, about the presentation he gave at the PMI North American Congress in New Orleans.

Dave Cornelius (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveauck) argues that social media, mobile devices, analytics and cloud computing (SMAC) have combined to create a technology ecosystem that supports disruptive and sustaining innovation. The ready availability of the SMAC ecosystem connects customers to new innovations and supports shopping on e-commerce sites and in brick-and-mortar stores. Importantly, the SMAC application has transcended retail and consumer marketing activities, and also has significant relevance in banking, healthcare, and other business functions.

In our interview we discuss SMAC technologies and their use in and impact on various industries. Using the SMAC platform, project managers can develop new products and services by renting technology capability without owning the infrastruc.ture, software, and support staff. Project management information systems (PMIS) can leverage the SMAC platform over a secure Internet connection to support collaboration between team members and enable transparency about a project 's health. Social media, mobile devices, analytics, and cloud computing are the amalgamation of mature technologies for the 21st century.

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This interview with Mark Layton was recorded at the Southland Technology Conference 2013 in Long Beach.

Mark Layton (https://platinumedge.com/) has been an entrepreneur, consultant, and trainer in project management for the last 20 years. (And as it so happens, Cornelius Fichtner was a student in one of his Scrum Master classes.)

Mark and Cornelius got together in Long Beach to talk about Agile estimation. Mark says that traditional requirement estimation techniques are a frustrating combination of wild guesses and false precision. While estimates are given down to the exact hour of effort, the accuracy of those predictions vary wildly and provide no opportunity to self-correct based on actual performance. This inaccuracy problem is then intentionally masked by an even more inefficient tool - contingency reserve.

In our interview, Mark describes how professionals using agile project management can adopt agile estimation techniques to work in a faster, easier, more informed, more honest, and ultimately, more accurate way than guessing to the hour how long tasks months in the future will take to complete.

Poor estimating is a huge source of risk for projects, and better estimating is one of several risk management strategies for agile projects that we can all learn from.

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This interview with Sarita Maybin was recorded at the Southland Technology Conference 2013 in Long Beach.

Sarita Maybin (https://www.saritamaybin.com/) gave us a high energy presentation at this year's SoTeC Conference. We discovered how to get done the things that matter most and set limits with people who make unreasonable demands, including three ways to say “no” nicely.

We recorded this interview right after she finished her presentation and discuss: How to determine which tasks are urgent, important…or neither; Three strategies for identifying priorities; How to spend more time on the tasks that relate to your goals; How to identify and eliminate your most common time wasters; How and when you procrastinate; Top five techniques for overcoming procrastination; How guilt, perfectionism and other personal traits stress you out and waste your time; Clues that you are on stress overload…and what to do about it; And some real life stress strategies.

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This interview with Alicia McLain was recorded at the Southland Technology Conference 2013 in Long Beach.

High performing teams don’t happen "auto-magically". Instead, Alicia McLain (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciarmclain) says that it takes a nuanced leadership style, consistency, persistence, patience, a structured approach and support to create the team culture necessary to bring the most out of people.

In this interview Alicia takes us on the journey through the steps to building high performing teams. We also discuss the important elements that contribute to building and sustaining high performing teams.

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Note: In the opening I say "Welcome to episode 246". Don't worry... it's 255 and I simply mis-spoke. Sorry about that...

According to Harold Kerzner 90% of what we project managers do is communicating. And a lot of this communication is done during project meetings. It can sometimes feel like you are running from one meeting to another and that your time is often wasted. Meetings don’t start on time, the issues aren’t dealt with, there is no agenda, there is no focus, nobody assigns any follow ups or tasks and of course then they also don’t end on time.

But what if there were a way to make meetings much more productive?

Jeffrey Steinke (https://www.lessmeeting.com) thinks there is and he has a lot of good suggestions for you. It all starts by not having a meeting at all and taking things offline. And then if you need to actually have a meeting, it requires planning and follow through. You can look forward to our usual bucket full of recommendations that you can apply on your project meetings tomorrow.

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This interview with Ricardo Viana Vargas was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

At this year's PMI Global Congress Ricardo Viana Vargas (https://www.ricardo-vargas.com) proposed a mathematical process to turn the results of a qualitative risk analysis into numeric indicators to support better decision making regarding response strategies. It was titled "Adopting the Quadratic Mean Process to Quantify the Qualitative Risk Analysis". Or in short... Quantifying the Qualitative Risk Analysis.

We review the risk management five-level scale for probability, the mathematical "quadratic mean" process involved to calculate the numerical exposure, and how you can quite easily apply this on your own projects. And yes, these are risk management strategies for agile projects too.

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This interview with Jack P. Ferraro was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

In his congress paper and presentation, Jack P. Ferraro, PMP (https://www.myprojectadvisor.com/ [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link]) argues that due to three, seemingly beneficial policies, some widely accepted project management practices, and the prevailing organizational structure, most businesses that continually share resources across projects experience enough multitasking to cut their productivity in half.

In our interview we look at the root cause of project portfolio underperformance and ways to increase the speed of benefit recognition through improved productivity of portfolio components. We start out by looking at what exactly the problem is with multitasking on your portfolio, why it is still so prevalent, how to double your project throughput and we look at the "What You Can Do" section from Jack's paper that discusses what everyone involved on a project can do in order to help achieve this 100% increase in throughput.

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This interview with Anne Pauker Kreitzberg was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

In this interview with Anne Pauker we introduce you to the Agile Critical Thinking framework. 

We discuss approaches and examples of this techniques and how you can use to influence stakeholders, clarify project definition, urgency, risk and impact — particularly when working on a cross-functional or virtual team. And of course Anne alsol tells us how to apply some of the tools to our everyday projects.

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This interview with Rich Maltzman was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

Regardless of one’s opinions on green business and climate change, enterprises are now putting significant effort into achieving sustainability goals. Project management is the “business end” of business. In our interview with Rich Maltzman (https://www.earthpm.com/) we learn that we project managers must embrace our role in transforming our organizations to meet these goals in a larger “enterprise” sense.

We begin by looking at a definition of "sustainable", why sustainability should really be addressed on a program/portfolio level, how Rich and his co-presenter David Shirley "reinvented the wheel" for sustainability and of course we close with lots of good recommendations on how you will be able to integrate sustainability on your projects starting today.

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This interview with Samad Aidane was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

Cultural intelligence, the ability to adapt to new cultural contexts, is becoming an increasingly important skill for project leaders. Our interview with Samad Aidane (https://www.neurofrontier.com/) will give you an understanding of the key insights emerging from cultural neuroscience research and their application to leading global projects and designing culturally sensitive change initiatives that stick.

We begin our interview with the question of what neuroscience has to do with project management and leadership, and how this understanding will help you in your daily project challenges. Then we discuss how culture impacts how we think & act and how this relates to the team members working on our projects. We close the discussion with several tips from Samad in regards to how you can use the results from this neuroscience research to improve your project successes starting today.

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This interview with Jesse Fewell was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

In this follow-up interview with Jesse Fewel (https://jessefewell.com) we talk about two recent publications that he worked on. One is "big" and he was a co-author and the other is "small" and he is both author and publisher.

We begin with the "big" one, which is the Software Extension to the PMBOK® Guide Fifth Edition. This PMI reference work brings together the project management approaches from the PMBOK Guide with adaptive approaches such as agile that are more commonly used in software development. We look at how it was developed and what it means for those managing software development projects. Remember, we're not talking about project management software, but about making software, so IT-led and software development projects.

Then we move on to the "small" book that Jesse wrote and self-published called "Can You Hear Me Now?". This mini-book fits into the palm of your hand and is a fast read. It walks you through tips and benefits for working with people outside your office. The book is the synthesis of researching today’s trends, together with personal stories from his colleagues and his own experiences of working abroad.

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This interview with Jesse Fewell was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

One of the stereotypes for agile approaches is that they only work for small projects. Ten or 15 years ago, that might have been the case, but things are vastly different today.

In this interview with Jesse Fewell (https://jessefewell.com/) we discuss how Agile techniques now are used as part of day-to-day project operations, from the largest telecom in Europe to the largest DotCom in the United Kingdom. But how does self-organization work for a thousand people? How can you possibly run a large program without any documentation or architecture? Jesse Fewell gives us the answers by looking at recent trends as well as actionable tips for growing out of small agile to big agile.

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This interview with Stephen Townsend was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

Every project introduces change to the performing organization. It is therefore no surprise, that change management is a concept that we project managers have to embrace and master. PMI's latest publication "Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide" helps us project managers learn more about and apply best practices from this field.

Stephen Townsend (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/steve-townsend/5/886/340) is the Director for Global Alliances & Networks with PMI and we met up with him to learn more about the Practice Guide. We learn why and for whom it was developed. We discuss the basics of change management and then look at the characteristics of change management at the portfolio-, program- and project level. And we close the interview with Stephen's recommendations for the #1 thing that you need to apply on your projects in regards to change management.

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