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

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

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

Sarita Maybin (http://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 episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam:

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 (http://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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This episode is sponsored by The PM PrepCast for The PMP Exam:

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 (http://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.