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We went on a Caribbean Cruise, which means that The PM Podcast is on a break this week. Please enjoy this video with some impressions from our trip. My apologies for the awful video quality. Instead of setting the camera to the highest recording quality I set it to the lowest...

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The next "real" episode is coming your way in less than a week...

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This episode is sponsored by The PM PrepCast for The PMP® Exam:

Incomplete or missed requirements, omissions, ambiguous product features, lack of user involvement, unrealistic customer expectations, and the proverbial scope creep can result in cost overruns, missed deadlines, poor product quality, and can very well ruin a project. The process of scope control in project management is typically how we address those challenges, and that's the topic of today's interview.

That is why Jamal Moustafaev (http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jmoustafaev/en) wrote his new book on the topic of Project Scope Management. It is a Practical Guide to Requirements for pretty much any industry and describes how to elicit, document, and manage requirements to control project scope creep. It also explains how to manage project stakeholders to minimize the risk of an ever-growing list of user requirements.

Scope is important because every single one of our projects is launched to deliver something. And that something is defined in our scope. So Jamal and I not only look at what the state of scope management overall is and how business analysis plays into this, but we end our interview (of course!) with project scope management tips and tricks for you. If you are struggling with project management scope creep, then you will be sure to pick up some handy ideas for getting your scope back under control. Enjoy the episode.

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This episode is sponsored by The PM PrepCast for The PMP® Exam:

Here’s a little secret for you -- everybody does it. At one point or another during their careers, every project manager will use Microsoft Excel to manage one of their projects!

That in itself is not surprising. After all, budgets are often tight and companies may not want to invest into full blown project management software. And if they have such a software there are only a limited number of licenses available, which means many stakeholders cannot access the tool. So we project managers make due with what we have. And practically everyone has Microsoft Office.

But what is surprising is the fact that we just improvise. We will simply use Excel to the best of our often mediocre knowledge in order to somehow force a project schedule into those cells.

Well... enter Doug Hong (http://www.linkedin.com/in/doughong/en) and his series of seven free Microsoft Excel tutorials, that you can find at http://www.exceltraining101.com/excel-project-management/ [Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link] . In these seven short videos Doug shows you how to use MS Excel and create professional Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, checklists, pareto charts and more. All for free.

And because I liked the free approach I decided to invite Doug and ask him when and how we should use MS Excel, what Excel features we should learn about to better use it for our projects, and how we can identify the moment in our projects when Excel is really no longer the right tool and we have to upgrade to something more solid.

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This is a special episode of The PM PrepCast for the launch of our new PMP Exam Coaching program.

This is the final interview in our series where we focus on PMP exam coaching and it is also the third interview where a PMP exam student talks about her personal journey and experience in using a PMP exam tutor.

In this interview you will hear the story of Tara Guidi, PMP. Tara attended a condensed PMP training class and then unfortunately failed her PMP exam. Once she realized that the condensed approach wasn't for her she chose to try PMP coaching where a professional PMP coach works directly with her and a personalized training schedule.

The approach was successful. She passed her exam.

Please visit www.pm-prepcast.com/coaching for more information about our PMP exam coaching program.