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Today’s overtime is an interview of our show host Cornelius Fichtner by Wayne Turmel from the Cranky Middle Manager Show.

Last week, Cornelius interviewed Wayne on the role of our bosses in Project Management. And today you get to hear Wayne interviewing Cornelius about how projects fit into into an organization and how important project management can be for organizations. Cornelius makes the case, that every single project in a company is very important.

He starts out by looking at a tiny project that is going on somewhere in a department, how this project relates to the overall economy of the country and then we bring it back to the performing organization and how each project should be embedded in this company’s strategy.

Lastly, we also take a look at how an ideal structure of management by objectives will help accidental project managers understand why they are doing a particular project and how it ties back into the company goals.

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Did you by any chance participate in a teleconference this week? And if so, how was it? Did people participate? Were they on time? Was there an agenda and follow up? Could you hear and understand everyone clearly? And did the teleconference begin and end on time?

If your teleconferences are in any way like the ones that we participated in on past projects, then you probably answered “no” to a number of these questions. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says Gene Dutz, business systems analyst and project management consultant. In this interview we discuss a number of soft and hard tools that will improve the overall quality of teleconferences on your projects. In most cases, these are easy to implement and come at little to no cost.

But we also have a very exciting announcement: We are launching Project Management Lectures, where we offer online project management training by the worlds brightest minds in project management today. To celebrate, we are giving away 2 copies of the first lecture called Dealing with Difficult People by Margaret Meloni, MBA, PMP. To participate, simply go to www.pducast.com and sign up to receive our newsletter. We will draw a winner on October 11th and everyone who signs up after the publication of today's episode gets a chance to win. This prize is worth $60 and 2 PDUs. Good luck!

This episode is reserved for subscribers of the Premium Podcast. Learn how to subscribe to the Premium Podcast to access this interview...

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In this Overtime episode we welcome back Gene Dutz to discuss teleconferencing hard tools. We look at Webex, Adobe Connect Pro and Dimdim. The last one, by the way, is free. Gene introduces us to the features of these services and how to use them effectively on your project. For instance did you know that you can use these services to record your teleconference so that team members who were absend can listen to the conference later on and catch up?

This is just one of the many tricks he has up his sleeve to help you use these tools to the fullest.

This episode is reserved for subscribers of the Premium Podcast. Learn how to subscribe to the Premium Podcast to access this interview...

Two weeks ago I was at the PMI® Global Congress in Denver Colorado. For two days I was surrounded by about 4,000 other project managers. I listened to a number of great and not so great presentations and I also participated in a few meetings of the PMI’s New Media Council. There were presentations on all kinds of topics including scope in project management.

My biggest problem is that in such moments it is very difficult for me to turn my brain off and more often than not thoughts collide and synapses meet and out come usually some good ideas and insights on project management. I have a personal issue with scope control in project management! The scope of what I thought I would be thinking about is spiralling, and I think that's a good thing! It shows the value of attending these events.

And over the coming episodes, I would like to share my thoughts with you, here on The Premium PM Podcast.

And I thought that since it is around Halloween, I start out with something CREEPY. In particular, Scope Creep.

To be precise, scope creep and the fact that it isn’t really all that bad a thing to happen on your project. In fact, I recommend that we should all embrace scope creep on our projects. Understanding scope creep is a crucial part of project scope management, but not one that we need to avoid.