It’s the end of the year, and you are one of the few who did not take vacation days. You are tired, and not feeling especially motivated, but you want to be productive. You want to put in an honest days work. What can you do?
Category Archives: Productivity
4 Ways To Refresh Your PM Career In One Hour
Stress is a fact of the project management world. The responsibility to deliver projects, week after week, gradually wears you down. On a Friday morning, you finally deliver a major project. Before you can even start to unwind, someone asks you to join another project. Suddenly, the sweet experience of a well delivered project fades […]
5 Project Management Techniques for Procrastinators
“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” Don Marquis Did you read the quote above and think, “Yesterday? I would be happy to be caught up with last Thursday?” This might be the perfect time to take a look at 5 project management best practices and how they can help you. 1) Define […]
Project Management Intuition
What is project management intuition? It’s those thoughts you develop that are not necessarily logical. These are thoughts which should be heeded. Some people might call this their gut instincts. Let’s take a look at an example: There was a project I managed where the organization was a balanced matrix. Of course you remember that […]
Overwhelmed? Manage YOUR Time
Are you feeling overwhelmed? Do you have too much to do and not enough time to do it? You have so many projects to manage and people who need to speak with you. It would also be nice if you actually got home at a decent time and saw your family and friends. Perhaps you […]
How To Create Project Documentation That Doesn’t Suck
A discussion on management plans started by my friend on Govloop recently about management plans got me going. My thinking on the topic of documentation in general has matured over the last few years. I don’t think I know everything though, far from it. What Makes Project Documentation Suck? There are several common problems people […]
My Most Productive Days As A Project Manager
I had a really productive day yesterday in my role as a project manager and senior systems engineer for my two teams. And yet, I only moved one item forward between both team kanban boards. How Can That Be? There are other days where I knock out 4-5 items I had planned. ?Schedule updates, documentation, […]
Jenga Project Management Processes
Project Managers can get a little nuts about process sometimes. I mean, really. ?Really crazy. ?We add, and add, and add. ?It feels good, I think it’s an addiction actually. But then we end up with a pile of (insert?expletive) that looks like a Jenga game about to fall over. We have to police ourselves. […]
Process for Process’ Sake (a rant)
I am dealing with some particularly frustrating bureaucracy and broken processes at the moment that I have no direct control over, so allow me to vent. Given that any system can produce
Do Your Project Teams Suffer From Chronic Media Multitasking?
More evidence for the benefit of war rooms and the elimination of distractions from your project team….
“There’s no question whatsoever that multitasking, especially among those who do it the most, is at the very least ineffective; and at the worst harmful.” Clifford Nass, Thomas M. Storke Professor – Stanford University