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Today we feature a Project Management Conversation with Joy Gumz, PMP. While most of us are project managers, Joy Gumz focuses on project audits. Her company is Project Auditors, LLC and she travels the world as a project auditor helping companies identify troubled areas on their projects before they become real problems. Would you like to know what issues she encounters most often during her project audits? Listen in. We also introduce you to several Helpful Resources that will help you to explore the topic of Project Auditing in more detail.

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How many project management books do you read per year? 1, 2, 3, 5 or even more? If you do read them then you will know the value that new books have in our profession: they take us to the next level. Whether it is a book on Napoleon on Project Management or one that is called Surprise now you are a Software Project Manager they all move our profession forward. So what kind of thoughts would a new project management book titled “The Fiddler on the Project” evoke from you? From me, it evokes that if I were a rich man, I would probably invest in it. Our guest today is Rich Maltzman, PMP and he would like you to write this book for him. Yes… you read right – he wants you to write his book. At least parts of it. Listen to the interview to learn more and get involved in some project management social networking.

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Back in Episode 070 we tried something new. Instead of an in-depth interview on a particular topic, our host Cornelius Fichtner invited Dina Henry-Scott to a Project Management Conversation. The feedback on that particular episode was so encouraging, that we decided to do more conversations just like it. We will of course continue to have our in-depth feature interviews but going forward you can expect many more Project Management Conversations.

Today's Project Management Conversation is with Shawn Futterer who is a certified project management professional with a broad range of experience. He started his career in 1992 managing quality control projects for a small manufacturing company and is currently working in a PMO for a Fortune 50 telecommunications company where he supervises project managers for the North region. Over the course of his career, Shawn has managed projects of all shapes and sizes with budgets of up to $100M. Shawn has a keen interest in the methodologies, strategy, planning and operations. He has over fifteen years of hands-on project management experience and has led, consulted on or contributed to: process development efforts, various methodologies and multiple training programs. Shawn attributes a project managers success to their ability to provide a strategic view and a demonstrated ability to interact and communicate effectively with all levels of an organization.

As usual we also have our helpful resources and we give away a license to the project management methodology of our sponsor www.mpmm.com. The giveaway ends on August 27, 2007. Listen to this episode to learn how to participate.

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Monitoring and Evaluation has been used by nongovernmental organizations for evaluating programs for decades. For the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank and other development banks, it is embedded in their organizational processes. Many have even published toolkits to promote understanding and adoption. For projects, processes for monitoring progress are far less established. Therefore, it is of little surprise that the quality of those monitoring processes can vary widely. For projects quality means at a minimum timeliness, relevance, reliability, accuracy, usability and credibility. Unless monitoring processes demonstrate these characteristics, they are unlikely to improve performance and enhance accountability. Our interview guest Joy Gumz from Project Auditors (www.projectauditors.com) has been working in the field of project auditing and project monitoring for quite some time. She wrote a paper titled "Why use a hammer when you need a wrench: Results-based monitoring and evaluation of projects" which she presented at the PMI® Global Congress in Budapest. Today, we discuss her findings.

We also introduce you to two helpful resources in the field of project monitoring and we announce the winner of our contest who will win one free license of the MPMM Project Methodology.

Click here to download Joy Gumz' presentation... (*.pps)

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Today's Project Management Conversation is with Cindy Sabin, PMP. We talk about the lessons learned from one of her past, worldwide projects. We hear about the importance of keeping the communications flow on such a project going as well as the need to understand who the decision makers & sponsors are. Then we move on to Cindy's current project. At the moment Cindy is in transition to a new job and she views her situation as a very large project. The product is herself and she discusses with us the three steps she identified for this journey.

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Today we are featuring a Project Management Conversation with Randy Magdaluyo whom we already met in Episode 73. This time we get a glimpse of the complexities that he as a project manager in the financial industry is faced with. I always found this aspect of project management to be one of the most fascinating facets. We all do the same thing, which is managing projects. But our industries are so different that by talking to a PM in engineering or the financial industry it almost seems that we are not working on the same general discipline. But in the end it is our job to get one task after the other completed, so that when all the tasks are completed, the project is done. And that is the beauty of project management - it may not look like we have the same job but we do.

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Having himself worked on projects in several countries our host Cornelius Fichtner was very much looking forward to this interview with Randy Magdaluyo. Randy works for a financial services provider in the USA and was given the opportunity to work as the IT lead on a project in Europe. This project brought together a team from 3 continents. We are discussing the project itself, its cultural and communications challenges, the success factors and what Randy did to overcome his personal culture shock. As usual we also have our helpful resources that complement this interview and we give away a license to the project management methodology of our sponsor www.mpmm.com. The giveaway ends on August 27, 2007. Listen to this episode to learn how to participate.

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You will probably have noticed that communications technology seems to make the world smaller and smaller and that our project teams are suddenly all over the planet. Your sponsor is in Germany, your customer is in Chile, your engineer in Togo, two designers are in Sidney and you yourself are leading this team while sitting with your laptop on the beaches of Tahiti. What a great life we PMs have! But unfortunately, these virtual teams are quite demanding. You must deal with a multitude of cultures, several time zones and the fact that your team doesn’t have a chance to meet face to face. That is not an easy task. Adrienne Keane can help. Adrienne is a PMP® credential holder and manages virtual teams for Cisco systems. She also teaches a seminar on Effective Virtual Management at the University of California Irvine. And today you will hear her best practices.

Click here to download Adrienne's presentation (*.pdf)...

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When your project fails, your sponsor will only call one person into his office to discuss this failure... you. As the project manager you are responsible for the success and failure of your projects. And that holds true, even if the reason for this failure was outside your span of control, even if you work in a matrix environment in which project managers normally lack formal authority. Yes, we all know that responsibility and authority should be in balance, but more often than not, your responsibility outweighs the formal authority that you receive. You have to fall back to other forms of authority - referent authority, expert authority, reward authority and penalty authority. Thomas Cutting, PMP, has written a series of articles on authority in his blog at www.cuttingsedge.com [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link] and we are happy to have Thomas on the program today. We look in detail at the various types of authority, how they apply in a matrix organization and in a projectized organization and we look at what you can do to regain your authority if you think that you have lost it. As project managers, we don't think about authority often enough. It seems to be something that sort of "just happens". This discussion will give you a lot of food for thought and you will look differently at your personal authority next time that you accept a project.

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In today's episode of The Project Management Podcast™ we welcome back Dina Henry Scott, PMP, who is the host of the Controlling Chaos podcast. We discuss our successes and failures, what we like and don’t like about our projects, we discuss our PMOs and we look at the the methodologies that we use. We finish it off with with the one thing that we wish we could change in our company. Oh... and we are having a lot of fun with it, too. This is everyday, real life project management brought to you by our combined experience.

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Due to a death in the family, there will be no episode of The Project Management Podcast™ this week. We will resume our program in 2 weeks. 

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This week, The Project Management Podcast™ proudly presents to you the 100th episode of The PMO Podcast™ , which is produced by Mark Perry from BOT International. Here is what Mark writes about the episode:

The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story
This week The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story presents, "Project Portfolio Management Deployment Guidelines, an interview with Dr. Ginger Levin", presented by Mark Perry, host of The PMO Podcast™. Is your organization considering implementing project portfolio management or refreshing its approach to PPM? Dr. Ginger Levin provides deployment guidelines for PPM, insights, and ideas helpful and applicable to just about any organization seeking to manage project portfolios.

The PMO Podcast™ Points Memo
The PMO Podcast Points Memo suggests, “It's not luck." Whether a competitor in sports, a leader of a business, or a head of a PMO, success or lack there of is seldom an act of chance. It takes a lot of work and no sooner do you get things going well, than you are faced with change and the need to refine that which you have just spent quite a bit of time and effort defining in the first place.

The PMO Podcast™ Mailbag
The PMO Podcast Mailbag provides the ninth in a series of ten tips for setting up a PMO.

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Sigma is the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet and the lower case sigma (σ) is the symbol used to depict the quality management approach Six Sigma (6σ). Six Sigma is a system that was originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve manufacturing processes by eliminating defects. It was defined as a metric for measuring defects and improving quality as well as a methodology to reduce defect levels below 3.4 defects per million. Six Sigma has come a long way and is a respected methodology. Our guest today, is Steven West, who is a Six Sigma Black Belt and works for a financial services company. We explore the Six Sigma program of his company, the projects that he has worked on and learn what being a Black Belt has done for him.

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Who defines what project management is? We all do. Some of you may have a blog and you publish your thoughts on project management that way. Or you discuss a methodology with a friend over lunch. Some introduce papers with exciting new ideas to attendees at conferences or give a presentation at their professional organization's monthly meeting. Others again write articles for newsletters or magazines. Then there are those who produce podcasts or discuss project management through other media. All of us define the current and future state of project management. And then there is Jerry Manas, PMP, President and founder of The Marengo Group, LLC (http://www.manasbooks.com and http://www.pmthink.com) who like many others decided to write a project management book. And it's the process of writing a project management related book that we are going to explore with Jerry today. Being a good project manager, he has a lessons learned file that he opens up for us. We hear how he came up with the idea, how he organized it, how he found a publisher, what it takes to publicize the book and what it felt like to hold the first copy in his hands.

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This week, The Project Management Podcast proudly presents to you the latest episode of the PM Lessons Learned Podcast, which is produced by Henry Will. Here is what Henry writes about the episode:

The Conference Call from 17 Aug 2006 was on the subject of "Scope Control - Handling The Scope Creep That Plagues Us All" as presented by Steven Blais, PMP. We took a look at project scope management. Scope control covers a lot of different topics, but one of the main aims is to avoid scope creep in project management. To understand that, we have to first look at what is scope in project management, and then cover how we can best control it effectively to get the most successful outcomes for our work.

Our PM Resources:

Career Segment: The Four Steps of Career Management as presented by Rod Colon of the ETP Network.

Join our Yahoo group for details and reminders of the call and other information to help you.

PMLessonsLearned.com is all about PMs helping PMs and is open to all. Visit us at pmlessonslearned.com [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link]