When I read the title of a recent article on PM Forum called “Green Project Management” I had a flashback.  At the risk of showing my “feminine” side, I remember talking with one of my female colleagues, and although I do not recall the details, this colleague mentioned to me that she was “having her [...]

  Teleconferencing, either audio or video, has become a mainstream activity for keeping connected with geographically dispersed project teams. As technology has matured, conferencing over phone lines or the internet (VOIP) has replaced many cross-continent flights. And, as frequent air travelers know, that is a good thing because commercial flying is not fun anymore. My [...]

Project managers – myself included – find it difficult to break away from the office, if not physically then mentally.  So many times at events, out to dinners, driving or walking around I see folks who look like they might be Project Managers on the phone, texting, checking their PDS (iPhone, Droid, Blackberries). Even in [...]

From time to time on this blog forum, I have talked about PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) as an industry standard on areas of PM responsibility and best practices. If you are a new PM, this book paints the entire project management field with a broad brush of process and organizational recommendations. (What is [...]

Software development organizations are not immune to the effect of our country’s sustained recession. There is pressure from all sides – senior management, customers and other stakeholders — to cut costs and comply with budgets.  The largest component of project costs and schedule variance fall under the purview of resource management. In my experience, ineffective [...]

“Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn’t have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.” Herbert Simon Cloud computing – that server in the sky – has gotten a lot of press recently. [...]

What do you do when you cannot get what you need or want by simply asking (or using brute force — as appealing as that might be)?  Negotiation is one way to get most of what you want when you run into this situation.  Negotiation may involve a simple two-person dialogue (I want Joe Smith [...]

It seems I cannot go anywhere these days without seeing people talking on cell phones, texting, taking phone pictures and sharing them – sometimes many of these at once. People want to use every free minute to communicate with someone. And, before you ask; yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black. I am [...]