Free Online Project Management Guide for New Project Managers
If you're taking your first steps as a project manager and feel like you're in way over your head with all the terms, acronyms, and best practices, we've put together something that can help. Today we launch our online Project Management Guide for Beginners. It's a complete guide that tackles project management fundamentals and addresses it
Convergent Thinking vs. Divergent Thinking: Why Planning Isn’t Always the Right Thing to Do
It’s time for project management professionals to not only think of themselves as the keepers of plans, but also the ones responsible for pulling the very best out of teams. To do so, they need to encourage and enable both pieces of the creative problem solving process: divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
3 Tips to Improve Project Management for Creative Teams
When everybody has ideas to contribute, managing a creative team requires you to assume the role of a funnel. Your team pours their ideas out and you need to combine all of them into something that makes sense. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to improve your project management for creative teams.
Interview with Project Shrink
I was interviewed by Bas de Bar recently. Bas has a great blog called Project Shrink. It is a valuable source of tips, ideas and other important information for project managers. Bas is also the author of "Surprise! Now You're a Software Project Manager." Those of you who are in software development might want to
Project Risk Management Tools (Ultimate Guide to Project Risk, Part 2)
This is the second in a two-part series for our Ultimate Guide to Project Risk. Read Part 1: Assessing Risk first, then return here to continue. Once you’ve completed your risk assessment, you’re ready to create your risk management response plan (using appropriate risk management tools). Note that risk management isn't something you check off your project to-do
Is It Possible to Combine Top-Down and Bottom-Up?
Both approaches to project management may have their pitfalls. Perhaps the best way to manage your projects and business would be to use a hybrid method, which takes the best features from the two approaches. Learn more about leveraging the two approaches by reading Andrew Filev's article published in the influential Web 2.0 Journal.
9 Project Management Lessons Learned from the Apollo 11 Moon Landing
“We can lick gravity, but sometimes paperwork is overwhelming.” —Wernher von Braun, Chief Architect of Apollo's Saturn V Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins may have been the most visible figures of the 1969 moon landing, but the Apollo 11 team included thousands of people led by a select group of program and project managers at
5 Project Management Lessons to Learn from Superheroes
With busy schedules, tight deadlines and many other day-to-day project management challenges, have you ever wished you had a super power to help you cope with them all in a magical way? Inspired by interesting comments to our CEO’s recent post "7 Business Lessons an Entrepreneur Can Learn from Superheroes", we thought of a few
The Ultimate Guide to IT PMOs
Companies with large IT departments and projects have complex needs that require advanced solutions. IT project management offices, also known as IT PMOs, offer oversight, guidance, and tools that will make your organization more productive and make it easier to scale. But what exactly is an IT PMO? What are the core IT PMO objectives and
When to Use a Project Calendar vs. a Gantt Chart
With so many options, how can you identify which project scheduling tool best suits your needs? Here, we’ll break down the differences between a project calendar and a Gantt chart, as well as outline a few scenarios when each one is more suitable.