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If you want to know what the “best” way is for you to manage cost, time, resources or quality on your project, then you can open the PMBOK Guide or turn to any of a dozen project management methodologies out there and they will guide you. But what about the best for you as a project manager to be productive and organized? Where can that be found? Personally I don’t recall a single PM methodology or framework that addresses your or my work style and gives us the tools to improve.

To discuss one possible approach we welcome Brian Fee (www.linkedin.com/in/brianfee37) to the program, who says that having a personal set strategy for collecting, processing, organizing and reviewing information has helped him as a project manager. He believes that it is a worthwhile exercise for other project managers to consider their own strategy for staying organized.

This is because there is an assumed level of competence that project managers are expected to just have in terms of personal productivity; and it never seems to be directly taught or addressed in the educational process. We are expected to be able to handle a tremendous onslaught of incoming  information effectively and also be able to perform processes and manage projects. Brian believes that many PMs (and other professionals, too) feel a great deal of stress juggling the information they receive through email, voice mail, hallway conversations, or meetings.

This interview is about is his personal experience and many of his recommendations that will help inspire you and you set on the right track to improving your own personal productivity.

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

In our first interview with Mario Henrique Trentim (https://br.linkedin.com/in/trentim/) we mainly focused on why stakeholders are important. We didn’t really talk about the how of identifying or engaging stakeholders, nor did we touch on stakeholder management. Let’s do that now.

We will once again open up Mario’s book Managing Stakeholders as Clients and learn about Mario’s approaches, tips, tricks and best practices to identify, engage and manage stakeholders.

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Recent research shows that project success often hinges on the ability of us project managers to meet and exceed stakeholder expectations. While this may not be a new revelation to seasoned project managers it still means that there is a new focus on stakeholder management in our profession. It's the topic of much project manager coaching and mentoring at the moment.

Mario Henrique Trentim (https://br.linkedin.com/in/trentim/) decided to put his experience and expertise on the subject in writing and wrote the book Managing Stakeholders as Clients. It is a practitioner’s guide that blends theory and practice for the rest of us. And by 'the rest of us' I mean project managers working in all kinds of environments. We need to take care of the needs of our stakeholders in predictive/Waterfall environments, agile teams (it's relevant to those in all agile roles including role of project manager in SAFe agile) and hybrid teams.

I’ve invited Mario to tell us why we should worry about the stakeholders on our project. As always when we have an author on the program we will talk less about the book itself, and focus more on his tips, tricks, best practices and Mario’s favorite tools to get the job done. Social media for project managers is one tool available to you for stakeholder communication, and Mario discusses other options as well.

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This episode of The PM Podcast will be especially interesting for all those among you who want to become better project managers, for those who love to read, or for those who fall into both categories. That is because our guest Elizabeth Harrin will give us her review of 3 books that are related to project management with lots of great takeaways for everyone.

The books are

• Do Nothing by Keith Murnigan
• Real Influence by Mark Goulston and John Ullmen
• Strategies for Project Sponsorship by Vicky James, Ron Rosenhead and Peter Taylor

Elizabeth also wrote a review for each of these 3 books on her website and I encourage you to stop by at rebelsguidetopm.com because she does address a few angles on her blog that we did not discuss.

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What would you say are the top 3 reasons why projects fail?

Of course there are many lists out there. Some give you the top 10 reasons, some the top 7 and they include things like lack of senior management involvement, unrealistic expectations, inexperienced project managers, improper delegation of task and responsibilities, failure to communicate and act as a team, or lack of resources.

But none of these made it to the list of the top 3 reasons why project fail from Yaron Sinai of Elementool (https://www.elementool.com). And just to give you a little preview here... “Poor requirements” is at the top of his list. And yes, while we review his top 3 reasons in detail, I think the much more interesting bit of the interview is the 2nd half, when we open Yaron’s book The Project Management Formula.

In this 120-page book Yaron mostly discusses many best practices and gives excellent advice on managing your projects. However, in our interview we focused on just the last 15 pages where he outlines 5 steps that will help you avoid project failure. The first one is all about defining project objectives and I’ll let him discuss the rest in the interview.

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Go ahead... ask a few people whether they think that preparing for and passing the PMP exam will actually make someone a better project manager. Most of them will tell you that they think not.

I’ve been a PMP trainer for the past 9 years and in all my online classes I have always tried to instill a sense of betterment in my students. Simply because I believe that if you take the approach that you are not just studying for the exam, but studying to improve your project management skills, then you will improve your skills.

And guess what? I’ve interviewed Peter Dakessian who recently passed his PMP exam and his approach was exactly that. Surprise.

So, if you are preparing for your PMP exam and you would like to follow my school of thought, and use your exam prep to both pass the exam and improve your skills, then Peter is the man for you.

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

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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 (https://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!

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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 (https://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 is part 2 of our interview with David Blumhorst (https://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.

In part 1 we talked about agile project portfolio management. We discussed the four exceptions you need to be aware of when integrating agile project management 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.)

Click here to download the white paper...
This is the white paper mentioned in the interview with David Blumhorst.

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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 project management doesn'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 (https://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.

Click to download the video:

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https://www.agileprepcast.com - This free lesson of The Agile PrepCast will be describing the Agile method called Lean. The term "Lean Software Development" was first used in the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, written by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Lean Software Development is a translation of lean manufacturing and lean IT principles and practices used in the Toyota Production System and then adapted for software development. Seven basic principles form the foundation of Lean Software Development, which in turn are implemented in an Agile project management environment by employing a set of 22 supporting tools.

Click to download the video:

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https://www.pm-prepcast.com/agile - In this free Agile PrepCast lesson, we present to you one video from our discussion of the different Agile implementation methods in which we look Scrum. Scrum is by far the most popular method used today by the world's Agile project management teams, and is also one of the most rigid in terms of recommended practices and procedures.

Scrum project management is a unique way of managing work in an agile environment. You can certainly add value to the Scrum team as a project manager, and that starts with understanding how Scrum works, the artifacts and team roles.

At the heart of agile project management with scrum is the Agile iterative cycle called the Sprint, which is supported by different types of project team "Roles", meetings called "Events", and documentation and tools called "Artifacts". Scrum is embraced by most organizations that not only want to implement Agile principles quickly on their projects, but are also interested in implementing Agile principles across their entire organization.

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https://www.agileprepcast.com - In this free Agile PrepCast lesson, we review The Declaration of Interdependence. The Declaration of Interdependence was published in 2005 by a group of Agile practitioners to help implement guidelines set forth in the Agile Manifesto. It contains six principles essential to "management' in general, not just to 'agile project management' or 'product' management, and outlines leadership methods used to manage the interdependency of people, processes and value in order to perform work.

Click to download the video:

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https://www.agileprepcast.com The Agile PrepCast is a videocast for those preparing for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® exam. It can also be used by PMI certified project managers to earn 30+ for their recertification. The Agile PrepCast covers all the knowledge, skills, tools & techniques that are described in the examination content outline and will be tested on the exam. This is the perfect solution for professionals working in an agile project management environment who want to take their PMI Agile project management certification.

It will be available for purchase on April 26, 2013 for the launch price of $129.99. To receive an additional 20% discount on this price simply go to www.agileprepcast.com and follow the instructions.

In the coming days we will release three videos to the subscribers of The PM Podcast.

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More and more people are preparing for their PMI Agile-Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® Exam. And you may have noticed that in the past 2 years the topics here on The PM Podcast have seen more and more Agile influences. This is partly because of my personal interest in Agile and partly because as a company we decided to develop and launch The Agile PrepCast (www.agileprepcast.com) that helps you prepare for this exam.

In today’s episode we interview Allen Matheson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenmatheson) who recently passed his PMI-ACP exam. What I liked about his experience on the exam was the fact that his exam application got audited, which is something that so many people dread. But you will hear from Allen that if you are truthful in your application and approach it right, then being audited is a simple and straightforward process.

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 week I am meeting with Craig D. Wilson . Craig is an experienced and very senior project manager who has been involved in the management of many large, enterprise wide programs that also included agile project management with scrum teams.

Because of this background I asked him to meet me in a coffee shop for an interview and answer the following “simple question”, which is: How do you scale Agile to the enterprise?

While Craig does not have a silver bullet for us that solves all our problems in scaling agile to the enterprise, he does have a lot of insight that comes directly from the enterprise front. This is hands on, practical, experience-led scrum agile project management training!

Before we get started with this interview here is a warning: If you are an Agile purist - that is to say someone who feels extremely strongly about implementing Agile or Scrum “by the book” and will be easily offended if someone suggests a different approach - then please press stop now. If that sounds like you, Scrum project management might sound like a strange turn of phrase! This is not the episode for you because Craig will give us his definition of Agile, will discuss the Agile approaches that he has applied on the programs that he managed, and present ways in which he scales Agile for an enterprise initiative. And he doesn’t do it 100% by the book. Instead he mixes and matches those approaches that makes sense for his environment.

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

In our last interview Bill Dow outlined some of the 12 steps that he recommends we need to go through in order to build a new PMO. These steps are based on his book The Tactical Guide for Building a PMOwhich provides PMO Managers with the knowledge and skills to develop, refine, and enhance their Project Management Office.

But what’s next. What do you actually have to think of as you are trying to implement and grow it?

To determine what you have to do we are going to talk about the PMO decision chart, metrics and measurements, PMO audit, performance tracking and more.

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Building a PMO is a daunting task. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a “simple” 12 step approach that would guide you through the process from start to finish? We can help you there. My guest today is Bill Dow who wrote The Tactical Guide for Building a PMO. The book will provide PMO Managers with the knowledge and skills to develop, refine, and enhance their Project Management Office.

In todays interview Bill and I will will discuss the 12 steps he recommends you must go through in order to build your PMO and then next week we’ll look at aspects of implementing and growing it

If you want to learn the tactical for building a PMO then today’s episode is for you