On October 22-25, PMI gathered its members and friends for the annual Global Congress in Dallas to discuss the core features and emerging challenges of the project management profession. One of the key areas of focus for the Congress was the new project management trends, i.e., those trends that may impact the industry in the coming years. Together with Elizabeth Harrin and Cornelius Fichtner, seasoned project managers, popular bloggers and my fellow PMI New Media Council members, we held a session addressing agile collaboration in virtual teams. With over a third of projects being agile and more work being done by virtual teams, we aimed to look at how project managers can successfully combine the two. Having combined our expertise in managing distributed teams, we came up with a few practical, battlefield-tested tips in the area of communication practices, Web 2.0 tools and beyond, which can help bridge the gap for agile teams working across geographic boundaries.
Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.”
Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is hidden inside, and you have to remove several layers to get to it. Just as you take one doll out of another, you ask a question “Why did this happen?” five times. Each response takes you one layer deeper to the problem cause. The technique is quite easy, but when practiced regularly, it gives you a lot of great insights about what needs adjustment in your company. One of such insights is that there is always a process/human issue behind every technical one.
John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” By using carefully designed experiments, you can do a better job than Wanamaker. For example, all professional advertisers today know about conversion tracking and A/B testing. These are basic tools of the trade for specialists in marketing or advertising that enable them to evaluate the effect of every small change in banner ads, landing pages and e-mails. But this kind of testing can only answer tactical questions and normally doesn’t affect business strategy. Is it possible to make the whole business structure respond to this type of feedback?
Recently, I read an interesting book by Peter Sims, “Little Bets,” which brings up a really important question: can failure, in fact, take us further than success? The answer is: yes, if we know how to deal with it. While interviewing the executives at Amazon, General Motors and Google, as well as successful musicians, architects and comedians, Sims discovered one thing they had in common. All of them used the same approach of relentlessly “making little bets” to test their new ideas, even if they were not sure about their success. Most of these bets ended up as failures, but five or six out of 100 turned out to be the breakthroughs. According to Sims, in most cases, there’s no mysterious genius behind the great achievement, but perseverance and the willingness to take small risks.
In this series of posts, I’ll analyze how failures nurture success and describe how learning through failures can help you develop your business into a real innovation machine. Through hardship to the stars!
Last year, I interviewed Phil Simon, a recognized technology expert, about his book, “The Next Wave of Technologies." However rapid technology development is, Phil does a great job in keeping up with its pace and considering all the latest trends in his works. In his third book, which was published a couple of months ago, Phil took a look at the emerging technologies from the small business perspective. The title speaks for itself: “The New Small: How a New Breed of Small Businesses Is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies.” What are “the new small businesses” and how do they leverage the opportunities brought by new technologies? Phil shared his point of view on these questions when we met to discuss his new book. Read our conversation to learn more.
My post about The Secret Ingredients of a Successful Distributed Team turned out to be quite popular, so I decided to follow up on it by sharing a slide deck I recently presented to the Information Management Forum members (IMF). I was invited to speak about virtual teams, as well as how companies can easily overcome challenges connected with their set up. The presentation has 5 practical tips on how to make your virtual project team more efficient. The list is not complete, and there’s always room for more! I hope to extend this list in a future post with your help.
Recently, I really enjoyed my time attending Net:Work, a new conference that was presented in San Francisco by GigaOM. The event evolved around the topic of remote collaboration, or as the organizers described it, the opportunities that new technologies “have created for connecting work and workers.” Infrastructure changes, the impact of the cloud, “mobilocracy” – those are just a few trends in the wide range that the speakers covered. There’s no doubt that today’s workplace is not what it used to be several years ago. In the modern creative economy, work extends the boundaries of a traditional office, and it has also become quite common for peers to be spread across several cities, countries and cultures. But how can we ensure that remote collaboration is efficient in such an environment? Is there any solution that would work for all companies? In this post, I’ll share my ideas on this topic.
Recently, Dave Garett, the founder of the well-known project management community, GanttHead.com invited me to take part in a collaborative project of creating a book. The book is called "Project Pain Reliever" and it is a collection of chapters by experts in various fields of project management aimed at helping those, who just start their project management journey. Each chapter represents a real life problem that you may be facing today and offers a solution, written in plain English. In my opinion, this book is what many project managers today are looking for when they have questions that PMBOK cannot really answer. The book is going through the editorial and publishing process and I will definitely tell you more about it, as soon as it comes out.
Working on this collaborative project was a very valuable experience for me, as I met lots of interesting people, who have profound expertise in project management. Today I want to introduce you to one of them, Peter Taylor, also known as "the Lazy Project Manager". Peter is a dynamic and commercially astute professional who has achieved notable success in Project Management; currently as head of a PMO at Siemens Industry Software Limited, a supplier of global product lifecycle management solutions. He is also very interested in maintaining a good work/life balance. Peter has very impressive project management background, which also allowed him to come up with his own methodology that helps project managers become more productive. Read our conversation below and find out how lazy project managers can be efficient.
A new tool came to our lives and greatly influenced the way we communicate. Twitter turned out to be next big thing of the social media world, and it looks like it’s here to stay. How can we explain Twitter’s immense popularity? Simplicity, convenience, speed? I’d say it’s all three of them that make the tool so sticky. In fact these factors even made many of us seek a similar tool to facilitate our project communications.
Have you ever wondered why some managers seem to be natural born multitaskers and run 10+ projects smoothly, when others seem to be having a hard time running multiple projects? Leading a company that offers one of the most popular project management software products on the market, I hear a lot of project management war stories and spend a lot of time analyzing the bottlenecks in project management and various ways to overcome them. During my analysis, I thought it would be a good idea to share those war stories with you to help you improve your management skills. So I’ve come up with a list of the 5 most common mistakes managers make when managing multiple projects. In addition, I accompanied them with the 5 strategies that will help you become a more productive project manager who can easily complete several projects on time and on budget. I also decided to split the list into five shorter parts, so that it would be more convenient for you to read. Here’s the first part of this series.
Andrew Filev is an experienced project manager and a successful entrepreneur. He has been
managing software teams since 2001 with the help of new-generation collaboration and
management applications. The Project Management 2.0 blog reflects his views on changes going
on in contemporary project management, thanks to the influence of collaborative web-based
technologies. More >>
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On October 22-25, PMI gathered its members and friends for the annual Global Congress in Dallas to discuss the core features and emerging challenges of the project management profession. One of the key areas of focus for the Congress was the new project management trends, i.e., those trends that may impact the industry in the coming years. Together with Elizabeth Harrin and Cornelius Fichtner, seasoned project managers, popular bloggers and my fellow PMI New Media Council members, we held a session addressing agile collaboration in virtual teams. With over a third of projects being agile and more work being done by virtual teams, we aimed to look at how project managers can successfully combine the two. Having combined our expertise in managing distributed teams, we came up with a few practical, battlefield-tested tips in the area of communication practices, Web 2.0 tools and beyond, which can help bridge the gap for agile teams working across geographic boundaries.
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Recently, I read an interesting book by Peter Sims, “Little Bets,” which brings up a really important question: can failure, in fact, take us further than success? The answer is: yes, if we know how to deal with it. While interviewing the executives at Amazon, General Motors and Google, as well as successful musicians, architects and comedians, Sims discovered one thing they had in common. All of them used the same approach of relentlessly “making little bets” to test their new ideas, even if they were not sure about their success. Most of these bets ended up as failures, but five or six out of 100 turned out to be the breakthroughs. According to Sims, in most cases, there’s no mysterious genius behind the great achievement, but perseverance and the willingness to take small risks.
Last year, I 
My post about 
Recently, I really enjoyed my time attending 
Recently, Dave Garett, the founder of the well-known project management community, 
A new tool came to our lives and greatly influenced the way we communicate. Twitter turned out to be next big thing of the social media world, and it looks like it’s here to stay. How can we explain Twitter’s immense popularity? Simplicity, convenience, speed? I’d say it’s all three of them that make the tool so sticky. In fact these factors even made many of us seek a similar tool to facilitate our project communications.
Have you ever wondered why some managers seem to be natural born multitaskers and run 10+ projects smoothly, when others seem to be having a hard time running multiple projects? Leading a company that offers one of the most popular 
