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Happy New Year! This is a short notice to all listeners to let you know what's happening to The PM Podcast and our website: Over the coming 2-3 weeks we are going to be completely redeploying our website. After that Cornelius is heading out the door to Philadelphia, Sydney and Manila. We do have a few interviews recorded (they will be published as soon as the new website is up) and we have some interviews scheduled for recording after he returns from his trip. So we should be back to "normal programming" starting March.

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

This interview with Dave Cornelius was recorded at the Southland Technology Conference 2013 in Long Beach. It is, however, about the presentation he gave at the PMI North American Congress in New Orleans.

Dave Cornelius (http://www.linkedin.com/in/daveauck) argues that social media, mobile devices, analytics and cloud computing (SMAC) have combined to create a technology ecosystem that supports disruptive and sustaining innovation. The ready availability of the SMAC ecosystem connects customers to new innovations and supports shopping on e-commerce sites and in brick-and-mortar stores. Importantly, the SMAC application has transcended retail and consumer marketing activities, and also has significant relevance in banking, healthcare, and other business functions.

In our interview we discuss SMAC technologies and their use in and impact on various industries. Using the SMAC platform, project managers can develop new products and services by renting technology capability without owning the infrastruc.ture, software, and support staff. Project management information systems (PMIS) can leverage the SMAC platform over a secure Internet connection to support collaboration between team members and enable transparency about a project 's health. Social media, mobile devices, analytics, and cloud computing are the amalgamation of mature technologies for the 21st century.

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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.