Project Team Synergy: How to Deliver High Performance

project team synergy

There is positive and negative project team synergy. The magic and power of project teams is captured in the term “synergy,” which is derived from the Greek word sunergos: “working together.” The difference in productivity between an average project team synergy and a turned-on, high-performing project team is not 10 percent, 20 percent, or 30…

Network Building Methods

Network Building

The first step to social network building is identifying those on whom the project depends for success — Mapping Dependencies. The project manager and his or her key assistants need to ask the following questions: Whose cooperation will we need? Whose agreement or approval will we need? Whose opposition would keep us from accomplishing the project?…

How To Be An Effective Project Manager in a World Full of Contradictions

effective project manager

An effective project manager has to be able to deal with the contradictory nature of his work. Why would I say that, well here is my view: Project management is, at first glance, a misleading discipline in that there is on inherent logic in the progression from formulating a project scope statement, creating a WBS,…

Organizational Structure: Do You Belong?

organizational structure

Once management approves a project then the question becomes, how will the project be implemented. This article examines three different organizational structure mechanics used by firms to implement projects: functional organization, dedicated project teams, and matrix structure. Although not exhaustive, these organizational structures and their variant forms represent the major approaches for organizing projects. The advantages…

PRINCE2 and Scrum, Integration

prince2 and scrum

There are some papers out there that reference a possible integration between PRINCE2 and SCRUM. While I do agree and feel that it is possible and even recommended I feel that the subject has net been treated with sufficient depth. Most of the papers suggest that the PRINCE2 process ‘Managing Product Delivery’ is place where…

Implementing Scrum: Challenges

implementing scrum

Organizations that want to make a move to Agile will need to fully understand what is Agile and what challenges are likely to appear on the road to implementing SCRUM. There are a lot of examples where Agile implementations have gone awry and it is costly on so many levels. Implementing SCRUM is not that easy and it…

SCRUM, all you need to know.

scrum

Scrum goes back to 1986. It was first defined as “a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal” as opposed to a “traditional, sequential approach” in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the New Product Development Game. They later argued in The…

Project Management Guide: Starting Out

project management guide

What made me do this you might ask? Well here is the main idea behind this project management guide: There are projected to be 15 million new project management jobs within the decade. (Source: Project Management Institute) Over the last decade project management has established itself as being one of the core professions inside an…

90 Questions You Should Ask When Brainstorming Project Ideas

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire

All of us have started a project at some point in our life and struggled with it in some way. No matter what kind of project it was, questions had to asked and answered, followed by execution. Once I asked all my questions and made the decision to go ahead with the project, I always…

11 Android Project Management Apps We Love, and You Should Know About

Project Management Apps

The world’s going mobile, and we’re no different for we love our mobile gadgets and apps too! So we wanted to share Apple, Windows and Android Project Management apps that we think could be useful for project managers. Before you go on and read our list please remember that these are some of the apps out…