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, 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.
Chris Anderson builds an interesting case around the concept of the long tail of retail (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More). I will save you the joy of reading it, and I won’t recount his whole work here. I still wanted to share an interesting story about collective intelligence from his book. Anderson writes that, today, NASA often calls on amateurs to watch for specific asteroids that might be headed for Earth. It all started when amateur astronomers helped to make observations of Supernova 1987 that led to the confirmation of a key theory explaining how the universe works.
At the PMI Global Congress that I attended in October, I met many project management practitioners. Some of them asked me about my views on Project Management 2.0. One of the questions was “How is Project Management 2.0 different from what many organizations have today?”
I decided to summarize my answers and came up with a short list of key factors that distinguish Project Management 2.0 from traditional project management.
Before I start digging into project management transformation due to Web 2.0 technologies, I would like to share some thoughts on the basic impacts of Enterprise 2.0 on companies’ structure and corporate culture.
One of the most important impacts of Enterprise 2.0, as I mentioned in my previous post is changing the management pattern inside an organization.
Professor Andrew MacAfee of the Harvard Business School, who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006, believes that new generation technologies, while penetrating into companies, will be able to empower employees and decentralize decisions, thus liberalizing management. This means hierarchical structures, employed in many organizations, will eventually be modified into flatter management patterns.
As we all know, the project manager in organizations traditionally has the burden of compiling plans and information for the team’s work. The information is then kept in disconnected files, no matter if it is a Microsoft Word file or a Microsoft Project file. The manager is struggling to bring the project plan to life as all the information on the project is concentrated only around a single person - himself. He first has to pull facts out of employees by meetings and e-mails, then put them into a file, then update the information, then communicate it to upper management and clients. The usual means of getting information from your employees turns out to be time-consuming and effortful. This “bottle-neck” effect creates additional, but unnecessary, duties for project managers.
The new generation of Web-based tools unleashes the power of collective intelligence and changes the pattern of project management. It allows associates to collaborate on project plans.
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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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.
Peter Taylor
," a book that will introduce you to the secrets of productive laziness, as well as teach you how to utilize your team in the best possible way.
Recently, Dave Garett, the founder of the well-known project management community, 
). I will save you the joy of reading it, and I won’t recount his whole work here. I still wanted to share an interesting story about collective intelligence from his book. Anderson writes that, today, NASA often calls on amateurs to watch for specific asteroids that might be headed for Earth. It all started when amateur astronomers helped to make observations of Supernova 1987 that led to the confirmation of a key theory explaining how the universe works.
At the 
