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Who defines what project management is? We all do. Some of you may have a blog and you publish your thoughts on project management that way. Or you discuss a methodology with a friend over lunch. Some introduce papers with exciting new ideas to attendees at conferences or give a presentation at their professional organization's monthly meeting. Others again write articles for newsletters or magazines. Then there are those who produce podcasts or discuss project management through other media. All of us define the current and future state of project management. And then there is Jerry Manas, PMP, President and founder of The Marengo Group, LLC (http://www.manasbooks.com and http://www.pmthink.com) who like many others decided to write a project management book. And it's the process of writing a project management related book that we are going to explore with Jerry today. Being a good project manager, he has a lessons learned file that he opens up for us. We hear how he came up with the idea, how he organized it, how he found a publisher, what it takes to publicize the book and what it felt like to hold the first copy in his hands.

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This week, The Project Management Podcast proudly presents to you the latest episode of the PM Lessons Learned Podcast, which is produced by Henry Will. Here is what Henry writes about the episode:

The Conference Call from 17 Aug 2006 was on the subject of "Scope Control - Handling The Scope Creep That Plagues Us All" as presented by Steven Blais, PMP. We took a look at project scope management. Scope control covers a lot of different topics, but one of the main aims is to avoid scope creep in project management. To understand that, we have to first look at what is scope in project management, and then cover how we can best control it effectively to get the most successful outcomes for our work.

Our PM Resources:

Career Segment: The Four Steps of Career Management as presented by Rod Colon of the ETP Network.

Join our Yahoo group for details and reminders of the call and other information to help you.

PMLessonsLearned.com is all about PMs helping PMs and is open to all. Visit us at pmlessonslearned.com [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link]

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As a project manager you have to be many things. You have to be a great communicator, a leader, a visionary, and be able to both build and inspire the team, to name just a few. First and foremost, however, you have to be proactive. You employ strategies to plan the future in order to proactively minimize risk on your projects so that you can deliver on time and on budget. Why then is it that when November comes around you can hear a collective groan rise from the community of PMPs as they ask, where they could quickly get 20, 30 or even 40 or more PDUs before the year is through? Is this simply a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes? No. I think that this is an acute case of not proactively trying to understand the PMI’s re-certification requirements. As we publish this episode on The Project Management Podcast™, it is about seven months before the end of the year, and we want to help you today to understand the PMP recertification process and how you can very easily gain those PDUs before year’s end.

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Listener Alexander Maslyukov wrote in and said "In my company there are functional managers who have the power. Functional managers assign salary, bonuses and have responsibilities for promotion of the employees. PMs don't have any instruments to force stuff to do everything. The only way to make the team to do something is to persuade them. But how can we motivate people?" In response to Alexander's question we are going to delve into motivation today. We review the various motivational theories, look at how to see if motivation is a problem on your project, what you can do to motivate and energize your project team on a shoestring and we end it with James R. Chapman's very elegant Motivation Triangle. Please consult the Helpful Resources to find links to the white papers and presentations mentioned in today's episode.

Are you studying for the PMP exam? Then subscribe to The Project Management PrepCast™ at http://www.pm-prepcast.com and study by listening with your iPod.