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Today’s overtime is an interview of our show host Cornelius Fichtner by Wayne Turmel from the Cranky Middle Manager Show.

Last week, Cornelius interviewed Wayne on the role of our bosses in Project Management. And today you get to hear Wayne interviewing Cornelius about how projects fit into into an organization and how important project management can be for organizations. Cornelius makes the case, that every single project in a company is very important.

He starts out by looking at a tiny project that is going on somewhere in a department, how this project relates to the overall economy of the country and then we bring it back to the performing organization and how each project should be embedded in this company’s strategy.

Lastly, we also take a look at how an ideal structure of management by objectives will help accidental project managers understand why they are doing a particular project and how it ties back into the company goals.

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Every project manager has a boss whom he or she reports to. At the end of the year this boss will be responsible for our performance review and decides whether or not we get an increase in salary. But during the year, most of us are wrapped up in our projects.

We have deadlines and budgets to meet, customers and other stakeholders to satisfy, risks to manage and then there are always these pesky project team members that are acting up. So what do our bosses do during all this time? Do they just sit back, sip coffee and enjoy the fruit of our labor when we successfully deliver the project end result?

Wayne Turmel from the Cranky Middle Manager Show doesn’t think so. He sees the role of our boss more along the lines of… but why don’t you listen in and hear him tell it in his own voice?

We also announce the winners of our MPMM giveaway, where two lucky listeners receive a copy of this project management methodology. And we speak to Josh Nankivel about his new Gizmo that give a personal blog to any PM Student.

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There are many ways for you to learn about project management. The best one is certainly through your own personal experience of managing a project. However, another very effective way to learn about what not to do is by hearing accounts of projects that have gone wrong. Hearing about the problems that occurred without having to suffer through them yourself will enable you to see similar issues on your project and then try and steer clear. In today's episode you are going to hear an account of such a project. Our show host Cornelius Fichtner has been mentoring a junior PM over the past 18 months on an important project that has gone from one problem to the next. Listen in to his recounting the story of the project and giving you tips on how to improve your weekly team conference calls and to use your status reports to make management face the facts of a project in trouble.

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We are a few days late with this episode of The PM Podcast because I was gone for the weekend. My wife and I celebrated our 15 year wedding anniversary and so we decided to go to Catalina Island, which is both a tourist destination and a nature reserve just off the coast of Orange County here in CA. So that makes this a couple of days late.

But wait… did I just say a couple of days…? No no no! We are just about ONE YEAR LATE! The interview that you will hear in this episode was recorded in late 2008. Getachew Teklemariam and I got together at that time, recorded this interview, I got it ready for publication and promptly forgot about it. That is until I received another email from Getachew about 3 weeks ago and I was wondering if we ever published this. No we hadn’t. As such, you could say that this particular sub-project is just about one year late...

In the interview, we discuss the overall state of project management in Ethiopia, the available training infrastructure, the industries using project management, how project management in Ethiopia could generally be strengthened and of course, what we project managers around the world can do to help.

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[Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link]

Have you ever had a project that was 7 months late? Today’s episode of The Project Management Podcast is such a project. In January of this year, our show host Cornelius Fichtner was on a cruise in the Mexican Riviera. During this cruise he recorded a number of Podcast episodes that were supposed to be published in February. But for some reason, today’s episode was forgotten and is now finally being published. In this episode, we focus on improving your project team performance by focusing on the project team members themselves. We have a number of helpful resources (click on the link below) that discuss how you can focus on your team members and we look at a specific example in which Cornelius helped one Podcast listener to support one of his team members and thereby keep a project on track. We are also giving away 2 licenses of the MPMM Project Management Methodology . Listen in to hear how to participate.

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Have you ever wondered what the differences are between some of the major PM methodologies? If yes, then this episode will definitely be of interest to you. Jason Westland and I take a closer look at the following 10 PM methodologies:

• MPMM
• Scrum
• RUP
• AUP
• EUP
• UPMM
• Tenstep
• PMCOP
• SSADM
• IEM

You'll get to hear their strengths, what they are used for and we'll throw some "PM methodology history" into the mix as well.

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Having a solid project management methodology that everyone in your organization follows is one of the most basic building blocks that any company needs. Jason Westland (www.mpmm.com) is joining us on the program today to discuss how to first select and then implement a project management methodology that fits your company needs and also your corporate culture. Jason will introduce you to a simple 5-step process that will guide your project management methodology implementation from start to finish. And because Jason has such a vast project management experience we also wanted to know from him why it is, that so many methodology implementations fail and give us his recommendations on what can be done about it.

We also announce the lucky listener who wins 1 professional edition of Insight Tree.

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Our Overtime episodes are normally reserved for the paying subscribers of The Premium PM Podcast. To give everyone an idea of what you get by susbscribing to the premium feed, we are making this episode available to everyone.

Jeff Berkel and his team from Metafuse, Inc (www.projectinsight.net) implement their project management software across the USA for their customers. In our interview we are taking a step back and we are looking at one of their implementations from a procedural point of vew. We learn about the problems that their customer had and how step-by-step Jeff and his team helped them to improve their PM processes and improve their approach to project management.

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The Capability Maturity Model Integration is known to most simply as CMMI. It is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. The goal of CMMI was to improve the usability of maturity models by integrating many different models into one framework. It was created by members of industry, government and the SEI. Our guest today is Jeff Berkel from Metafuse, Inc (www.projectinsight.net). He and his team have lead projects helping their customers implement CMMI. We start out by giving you a CMMI overview, learn how it compares to other capability maturity models and then take you step by step through the general process of a CMMI implementation project.

We also announce the winners of our 100th episode giveaway who both win a copy of the Alan Parsons Project CD The Turn of a Friendly Card, and we have a new giveaway starting and you can win a copy of Insight Tree. Listen to the episode to learn how to participate.

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For our 100th episode we are leaving the realm of “traditional” project management. We are taking a one-legged sideways step into the music business but we will still keep one foot firmly grounded in our own art. I am extremely pleased to welcome Alan Parsons (www.alanparsonsmusic.com) on our show today. Alan is a record producer, audio engineer and musician, who is probably best known for his engineering work on Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side of the Moon album and of course he is the founder of the Alan Parsons Project. From the late 70s to the late 80s the group produced 10 successful albums and their most played song is probably Sirius. Alan and I discuss the roles & responsibilities of a record producer in the production of an album, how the role has changed over the years, we discuss the processes involved in creating a successful album and you’ll be very surprised to hear what Alan thinks is the most important skill on the job.

As part of today’s 100th episode we are giving away two Alan Parsons Project CDs: The Turn of a Friendly Card. Listen to the episode to learn how to participate.

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Today’s overtime is with Stacy Goff. In last week’s episode Stacy and I discussed his paper titled “Measuring and Managing Project Quality”. And he mentioned during that interview that “My favorite Quality Indicator is the Planned versus Actual Cumulative Review Count”. So I gave Stacy another call to talk about these reviews in particular. We will learn all about the dos and don’ts of these reviews. And we will also look at the Periodic Table of Project Management Competence Elements.

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Several Quality-related problems are unique to projects. For one, it is difficult to measure. In fact, often key stakeholders cannot evaluate the true quality of the results until the delivery day, and then it is too late to do anything to resolve gaps. Also projects often produce something new. So there are few standards against which to evaluate “good” results. This means we are faced with the problem of having to measure something that is difficult to define and nobody has seen before. It's a problem. Stacy Goff, president of Project Experts (https://www.projectexperts.com), recently wrote a paper on exactly this issue. We welcome him back on the program to discuss his definition of quality, how using measures and indicators can help, learn about his favorite quality indicator and you'll hear a number of tips from his quality management toolkit, enabling you to measure quality on your projects.

In our Gizmos section we look at Insight Tree and we announce the winners of Jack Ferraro's book The Strategic Project Leader .

Read Stacy's paper titled Measuring and Managing Project Quality (*.pdf)

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Carrying on our series of leadership podcasts, we continue our discussion with Jack Ferraro on Strategic Project Leadership. We look at The Platinum Rule behavioral compatibility assessment and The MyProjectAdvisor Leadership Competency Pyramid. In particular we discuss the characteristics of a project leader and how we translate the theoretical knowledge from these tools into our daily lives. Jack also discusses how a strategic project leader uses efficiency, customization, foresight and connectedness in order to manage a successful project.

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In addition to overseeing projects, today's project managers are expected to provide creative input and use their leadership to create an environment that can respond rather than react to changing parameters. And then there are also these continuously moving objectives and requirements that need to be managed. According to Jack Ferraro, this new landscape calls for a service based project manager, which he discusses in his book titled The Strategic Project Leader.

In our interview with Jack we explore the attitudes and behaviors that define successful leaders, the importance of a service view in project management and most importantly we discuss and give you tools & tips on how to go from being a certified project manager to the point where you are a strategic leader. In this one of our leadership podcasts you'll pick up some actionable advice on how to grow your leadership skills.

Click here to read Jack Ferraro's white paper titled Self Directed Leadership Development (*.PDF)

Our other features: In our Gizmos section we introduce you to Processes On Demand by BOT International, a tool that will help you set up your Project Management Office (PMO) and improve your organization's project management maturity. We announce the winners of the giveaway of Jerry Manas's book Managing the Gray Areas . And we also start a new book giveaway for Jack Ferraro's book The Strategic Project Leader .

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In this episode Jerry Manas gives us additional insights into the gray areas. Because his book is called Managing the Gray Areas, we are concentrating on the actual management process. The tools that Jerry recommends and which we discuss at length are

• Ideals - Standing for something
• Leading by Questioning
• Systems Thinking
• Empathy and Cultural Awareness

Since these are mostly tools from the softer end of managing the gray areas we then go ahead and also spend time looking at a number of hard tools.

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Have you ever managed a project where everything was either black or white, yes or no, approved or not approved? You probably haven’t. If your projects are like mine then most decisions that are made are a compromise. You give a little here, you take a little there. In project management nothing is really ever black and white. So don’t adjust your project plan, for you have entered the gray areas. And “Managing The Gray Areas” is the title of the new book written by Jerry Manas, PMP, who joins us on the podcast today to talk about these gray areas and all the tradeoffs that we project managers have to make every single day.

In our Gizmos section we introduce you to a new project management podcast called PMPOD. You can find it at www.pmpod.de .

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In this episode we continue our discussion with Lee Fischman on experimental projects. However, we shift our focus a bit and discuss successful team management. Lee argues that in order for an experimental project to be successful your team will need to perform a number of roles or "themes". He identified 7 such themes that will make you successful and we are going to look at all 8 of them. And no, that wasn't a typo. Even though we discuss project team management in the context of experimental projects, Lee's findings and recommendations are applicable across the board. Managing teams would be a lot simpler Especially his recap at the end is excellent advice for managing your teams.

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Search for "Experimental Projects" on your favorite search engine and you will find millions of entries. However, most of us "corporate" project manager types will probably never have been involved in this branch of project management. On experimental projects, the outcome is uncertain, the road is bumpy, you will probably take a few detours and failure is part of the plan. Lee Fischman joins us on the program today to discuss not only the concepts behind experimental projects but also to take a look at how you can improve their outcomes. Put your brain into overdrive... especially if you have never been confronted with an experimental project.

And here are the winners who each receive a copy of of our brand new PMP Exam Formula Study Guide: Don Ellis (Premium Podcast Subscriber) and Ozeas Santana Filho from Sao Paulo in Brazil (Free Podcast Listener).

Click here to download the PDF presentation that Lee Fischman gave at the NASA Project Management Challenge in 2006...

If the above link does not work, you can download it from the website of Lee's employer...

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Today we continue our discussion with Margaret Meloni on your Professional Brand as a Project Manager. We discuss that actions will speak louder than words when it comes to your professional brand, how to ask feedback from others on your professional brand and we also want to know from Margaret if this whole concept really works and ask her to apply it in an example. As part of this episode you will also receive Margaret's white paper titled "Own Your Reputation. Own Your Brand". In it, Margaret gives you the 11 steps necessary in order to define your professional brand.

And if you listen closely you can hear me say "personal brand" instead of "professional brand" several times during the interview. Margaret says that it's a common mistake. But I make it up to her at the very end of the episode... ;-)

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Have you clearly defined what sets you apart from other project managers? Do you understand how your own behaviors make others understand you as a brand? Can you "reap" the benefits of others promoting you instead of having to do it yourself? You will be able to answer all of these questions with a resounding "yes" if you are clear about who you are as a professional. If not, then others will make up their own image for you. Then they will broadcast that image. Wouldn’t it be better if you took control? To help you out with this we are extremely happy to bring back Margaret Meloni to discuss "Your Professional Brand" and how you can quite easily influence how others see you and help promote you. We give you a definition of the professional brand, we talk about the importance of having one, what benefits you will receive from it and most importantly, Margaret opens up her toolkit to you and gives you a step-by-step overview of how you can manage your own personal brand.

And here are the winners who each receive a copy of Hans Jonassons's book Determining Project Requirements: Adam Torres (Premium Podcast Subscriber) and Michael Potter (Free Podcast Listener).

We are also starting a new giveaway where you could win a copy of our brand new PMP Exam Formula Study Guide. Listen to this episode to learn how.