Your dream company has invited you to interview for a project management job. They’ve asked you their questions, and now it’s your turn to find out whether the company is a good fit for you. Asking the right questions can give you an accurate glimpse of what it will really be like to work for...
How to Execute Projects That Deliver Results: 3 Strategies
Anyone familiar with the saying, “The best-laid plans of mice and men,” also realizes that no matter how well you prepare, your efforts can easily go off the rails without focused attention and proper follow-up along the way. Organizations and teams need to pay attention to project execution in order to deliver impactful projects. That’s...
7 Tools to Gather Better Software Requirements
Gathering software requirements can be as much fun as trying to count function points or code a webpage using a vi editor. The process usually involves the software team assuming that business customers will communicate everything that their hearts desire as succinctly as possible. Business customers have a tendency to expect software teams to be...
Raising the Profile of Project Management in Your Organization
Project managers know that good project management practices help organizations achieve better results with tighter cost control and a stronger focus on managing risk. In business terms, project management helps you deliver more with less. You know that. But do people higher up the organization understand it in the same way? The role of project...
6 Essential Skills for Project Managers
Years ago I was in Brazil managing the installation of a monitoring system for a large construction project. As I told the chief electrician how a piece of equipment was to be mounted, he raised his eyebrows and said: “You’re the boss.” I knew what was happening: Because I was the project manager, the chief...
5 Reasons Clients Need Project Managers
Have you ever had to justify adding a project manager to the project? Adding a project management professional to a team to “just manage” the project is still a relatively new concept, if you consider that project management as a profession is still a young one. The Project Management Institute (PMI) was only founded in...
4 Tips to Get Promoted As a Project Manager
The first questions I ask project managers who listen to my podcast and connect with me by email is this: When it comes to your career in project management, what are your desires, pains and needs? After communicating with hundreds of project management professionals, the answers often seem to gravitate around this one common topic:...
How to Find a Job Using Your Project Management Skills
You are a project manager and you excel at your job. You communicate well, are an effective leader, have the experience, and inherently know how to deliver outstanding projects. You might even speak multiple languages and have an interesting, compelling resume. But when it comes to landing your next job, you always feel a bit...
9 Ways to Up Your Project Management Game
There’s enough going on every day at work that sometimes just getting things done is a full-time job. However, in order to make a meaningful difference to the projects you work on and to your career, you need to keep honing your skills. An added bonus: learning keeps us from getting bored and stuck in...
10 Reasons to Be Thankful for Project Managers
If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you either are a project manager or you work closely with one. And it’s probably not a secret that project managers are often seen as the type of people who are rigid and overly concerned with following processes and sticking to the plan. This popular YouTube video...
What Project Managers and Magicians Have in Common, Or: Why Harry Houdini Was the World’s Greatest Project Manager
On my desk, I have a bobblehead figure of Harry Houdini, the world’s greatest magician and escapologist. It reminds me that every project needs a little magic, and every project manager needs a little bit of “woofle dust” to make obstacles disappear and help launch dates align with the project schedule (even when you’re using...
What You Need to Become a Big Data Marketing Agency
The agency world has changed markedly in the last few years, thanks to the rise of marketing automation software (Marketo, Eloqua, and Hubspot, to name a few). Marketing automation generates a tremendous amount of data, most of it captured in a data silo for each application. But siloed data makes it difficult to analyze trends...