From the monthly archives:

July 2011

Research shows women don’t want management jobs

July 27, 2011

Intellect’s Women in IT Forum and womenintechnology.co.uk recently released the results of their survey about women working in the technology profession. The survey shows that although 8% of women have reached director-level roles, up 3% on 2007, many women are not interested in pursuing pure management roles and want to remain doing hands on, technical jobs. [...]

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Podcast: Communicating without breaking the bank

July 25, 2011

A while back I recorded an interview for the American Management Association’s podcast series, Edgewise. The interview is one of my favourite topics – the use of social media in the workplace. We chat about new technology, why we need to consider new technology in the first place and setting up wikis and blogs to [...]

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Is project management training really effective?

July 20, 2011

There’s a whole industry around project management training. Job adverts declare that you have to be PMP certified or a PRINCE2 Practitioner. But does training actually make a difference to how you do your job? Training can make you about 26% more effective, according to research by PM Solutions. Only 28% of organisations bother to [...]

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Talking Integrity with Rick Valerga

July 19, 2011

Rick, welcome to A Girl’s Guide to Project Management! Can you give us a short description of what your book is about? The Cure for the Common Project is all about making the jump from project manager to project leader.  Processes, tools, and templates are one thing.  But they can be completely undermined by low [...]

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Ask the Smart PM: Networking Within the Organization

July 18, 2011

This is a guest post by Conrado Morlan, the Smart PM. Dear Smart PM… I am a new hire at the project management office of a large corporation. I had been working in project management for several years as a freelancer. Although I consider myself to be a good networker, I found difficulties networking within [...]

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The PMP exam is changing!

July 13, 2011

The PMP exam changes next month. I spoke to Margaret Meloni, MBA, PMP, tutor at UC Irvine Extension and herself a blogger, about the forthcoming changes. Margaret, how is the PMP exam changing in August? Approximately every five to seven years the Project Management Institute (PMI) revisits the role of the project manager to ensure [...]

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Book Review: A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management

July 11, 2011

Risk meetings don’t have to be boring, although in my experience they often are.  A Short Guide to Facilitating Risk Management is out this month, and it specifically addresses how to get the best out of your risk management meetings. This book, by Ruth Murray-Webster and Penny Pullan, provides practical guidance on facilitating risk workshops, [...]

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Management of Value

July 6, 2011

This video, which features Polly Murphy, the trainer who taught me MSP over a couple of weekends, focuses on the OGC guidance about Management of Value. Polly explains the basics about managing value in projects.

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How to Manage in a Matrix Structure Part 2: Dealing with the Challenges

July 4, 2011

In my last post about project management in a matrix structure I shared 4 challenges of that environment. This week I want to talk about how we can overcome these. This was a topic that Shilpa Arora, PMP, spoke about at a recent Women in Technology event. The 4 challenges she discussed were: Lack of [...]

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