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In this special episode we introduce you to Guerilla Project Management - a blog and podcast about the mindset that Project Managers must adopt to be able to effectively manage today’s complex projects.. The show is hosted by Samad Aidane and here is what he writes about this particular episode:

I had the distinct pleasure to speak to Mr. Doug DeCarlo, author of the landmark book, eXtreme Project Management: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility and one of my great Project Management teachers.

Few years ago, I read this paragraph in one of Doug’s articles:

When teams heed nature’s call and default to their survival instincts, the best-intended project management methodologies and training go up in smoke. This is why, for many project managers, Guerilla Project Management (GPM) has become the de facto project management methodology of choice.

These words inspired me to start this Guerrilla Project Management blog and podcast.

Doug’s book helped me understand why, like thousands of other project managers, I was struggling leading my projects despite all my best efforts applying all the traditional project management principles, tools, and best practices that I was taught.

For the last fifteen years — from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China — Doug has lived in the trenches with over 250 project teams having budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. Mission-critical initiatives were in the arenas of: information technology, financial services, e commerce, research and development, process reengineering, continuous improvement, sales generation, new product introductions and organizational change.

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This episode is sponsored by https://www.pducast.com:

Do you tweet? Are you on facebook? Or maybe you have a LinkedIn account, a Xing account or an account on any of dozens of social media websites and you may have asked yourself... OK... so how do I use this to 1) find my next job and 2) manage a project using a virtual team?

You've come to the right place because I have invited Bas de Baar to discuss exactly these two topics. We'll start out with a definition of social media, how a project manager can best use social media to network to improve career options and Bas's many suggestions on using social media in a project setting for improved team communication.

And in our Gizmo's section we take a closer look at www.projectmanager.com. We talk with their CEO Jason Westland who has been a guest on the program previously.

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This episode is sponsored by https://www.pducast.com:

If you work in a small company then it is quite likely that your project portfolio application is just a list of current projects in Word, Excel or even handwritten on a napkin. But once you outgrow this stage you are going to be faced with a myriad of project portfolio tools with an even more confusing array of features that you may or may not need.

My guest today, Curt Finch, is going to make this a lot easier for you because together we are going to look at the 6 top criteria to consider when shopping around for a project portfolio application. We'll be starting out with a more general look at what PPM solutions are and we'll end with looking at which of these criteria companies usually have most problems with during the actual implementation of the software.

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This episode is sponsored by https://www.pducast.com:

Let's do the following exercise together: Today or tomorrow when you get to your office I want you to take a look at your organizations portfolio of projects. Obviously, the more project management maturity your company has, the more detailed this will be. However, what you will see in most companies is that the portfolio usually only contains the large, important or strategic projects. But what about the smaller ones? You know... those 30 projects which individually don't look like much but when you look at them as a whole they become a sizable chunk.

Often they are missing in the portfolio. So because they are "not important", would take too much time to keep track of, have too small a budget or a million other reasons they are not on anyone's radar. But small projects, while often overlooked, are still crucial to a company's success and will cost you a lot of money if managed improperly.

This is the premise of our discussion today with Curt Finch, CEO of Journyx (http://www.journyx.com). We discuss how he defines a small project, why we tend to ignore the small ones,  how he recommends that we manage all of these small projects, we look at the 3 key best practices that we must implement on a small project to be successful and what you can do today to improve overall management of small projects in your area of influence.