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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.

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

This interview with Jack P. Ferraro was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

In his congress paper and presentation, Jack P. Ferraro, PMP (http://www.myprojectadvisor.com/ [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link]) argues that due to three, seemingly beneficial policies, some widely accepted project management practices, and the prevailing organizational structure, most businesses that continually share resources across projects experience enough multitasking to cut their productivity in half.

In our interview we look at the root cause of project portfolio underperformance and ways to increase the speed of benefit recognition through improved productivity of portfolio components. We start out by looking at what exactly the problem is with multitasking on your portfolio, why it is still so prevalent, how to double your project throughput and we look at the "What You Can Do" section from Jack's paper that discusses what everyone involved on a project can do in order to help achieve this 100% increase in throughput.

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

This interview with Ricardo Viana Vargas was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

At this year's PMI Global Congress Ricardo Viana Vargas (http://www.ricardo-vargas.com) proposed a mathematical process to turn the results of a qualitative risk analysis into numeric indicators to support better decision making regarding response strategies. It was titled "Adopting the Quadratic Mean Process to Quantify the Qualitative Risk Analysis". Or in short... Quantifying the Qualitative Risk Analysis.

We review the risk management five-level scale for probability, the mathematical "quadratic mean" process involved to calculate the numerical exposure, and how you can quite easily apply this on your own projects. And yes, these are risk management strategies for agile projects too.

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

This interview with Anne Pauker Kreitzberg was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans.

In this interview with Anne Pauker we introduce you to the Agile Critical Thinking framework. 

We discuss approaches and examples of this techniques and how you can use to influence stakeholders, clarify project definition, urgency, risk and impact — particularly when working on a cross-functional or virtual team. And of course Anne alsol tells us how to apply some of the tools to our everyday projects.