Effective project managers learn to deal with the political aspects of change, rather than being run over by them. This paper by Randall L. Englund (Executive Consultant, Creating an Environment for Project Success) discusses approaches PMs can use to manage the politics of change. It includes a detailed outline of a political plan for overcoming obstacles through maximizing stakeholder support, coalition building, and focusing efforts where they are most likely to be effective.

This paper arose from the authors' work facilitating 100 virtual meetings, both for the Navy and other related organizations. These meetings included idea generation, planning, decision-making, issues surfacing, status briefings, environmental scanning, collaborative writing, training, and expert briefings. From this experience the authors identified their set of lessons learned, and honed a set of best practices for addressing these lessons. The lessons and practices cover specifics in areas like effects on virtual meetings when the groups are in different timezones, how to get all parties to follow an effective meeting process, and how to deal with issues with virtual meeting technology.

This paper provides a comprehensive picture of valuable skills to develop as you move through your career, with the very important context of why you need them (from the "customer's" viewpoint), and an integrated understanding of how presentation skills, technical expertise, meeting management skills, networking, business understanding, etc. can provide incredible career leverage. It also covers how to come up with a personal strategy for developing those skills, and how to continually "market" yourself — communicating and using your capabilities to maximize your opportunities, your success, and your overall career satisfaction. This paper was originally written for an audience of technical contributors at a professional development conference, and thus may be something you'd like to show technical team members, to encourage their career growth in areas that will benefit your projects.

What kind of project are you running, really? Find out in this excerpt of Doug DeCarlo's new book eXtreme Project Management: Using Leadership, Principles, and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility (available from Amazon.com). Read the full text of the introduction and first chapter, which describe the difference between traditional and eXtreme projects, and the mindset needed to cope with today's high-speed, rapidly changing projects. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

You know your projects don't fit the traditional mold. So how do you cope? This excerpt (the full text of Chapter 2) from eXtreme Project Management: Using Leadership, Principles, and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility redefines projects and project management, and outlines the eXtreme Project Management model. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Is your company relatively new to formal project management - and knows it must improve how projects get done - but is worried about getting fast enough results and avoiding bureaucratic "process-itis"? This presentation from the recent ProjectWorld conference covers in detail how to rapidly implement some high-impact, low-overhead project management. It includes a simple project framework, several must-do techniques for any project, including how to run effective project kickoffs, and how to get the techniques into use on multiple projects now.

The idea of using outside partners to increase what your organization can get done, or get access to a competency your group doesn't have, sounds wonderful. But we can't overlook the difficulty of actually achieving truly synergistic partnerships-and ultimately successful projects-using such team members outside the corporation. If not created and managed properly, these teams actually can seriously threaten a firm's critical time-to-market goals. This paper provides some ideas for assessing and selecting team members, planning a project considering the specific ramifications of remote members, and managing communication and the project's activities to successful completion.

Project managers vs. technical managers and developers. Respect for process and schedules vs. the cult of creativity (read: invitation to project chaos). One of the most challenging aspects of implementing project management in an organization is reconciling the viewpoints of the project managers and the team members. Project management tools and talk can leave technical contributors bored, resistant, or outright rebellious. Are project managers and technical team members hopelessly far apart? Or do we just have a language and perspective problem? Experience from the field says it’s the latter.

In this paper, Cinda Voegtli looks at this issue from both sides, with a legitimacy that comes from having extensive experience in both worlds. Using examples from actual projects, she shows how to create a partnership between project management and technical teams based on a mutual recognition of value, concerns, and needs.

Even the best-planned projects often end up in a painful "endgame". In this "in the trenches" look at the late stages of a project, Warren Craycroft discusses some of the breakdowns and crises that occur and offers some tips, tools, and advice on how to deal with them.

Are leaders born, or are they made? How is leadership taught? How is it learned? In this white paper, Warren Craycroft takes a look at the study of leadership and compares the approaches of two leadership scholars, Warren Bennis and John Gardner, as they wrestle with these and other leadership questions.

To enable an organization that executes well to its strategic plan, your Project Management Office (PMO) can make the difference - IF it is set up to effectively eliminate typical ongoing fights over resources and project priorities. This paper from International Institute for Learning and EPM Solutions takes an executive-level look at the elements of the PMO that can dramatically increase the probability of your organization meeting its goals. It focuses on four major processes: Choosing the right projects via a new kind of strategic planning, permanently linking strategies to projects, managing the project portfolio correctly, and measuring the PMO correctly.

As knowledge management evolves from fad to business imperative, many organizations are discovering the limited ability of information technology to capture and share ideas, insights, and know-how. Richard McDermott presents communities of practice as a better vehicle for knowledge sharing and discusses ten critical success factors in building vibrant, effective communities.

Recent developments in information technology have inspired many companies to imagine a new way for staff to share knowledge and insights. Instead of storing documents in personal files and sharing insights with a small circle of colleagues, they can store documents in a common information base and use electronic networks to share insights with their whole community. But most companies soon discover that leveraging knowledge is actually very hard and involves more community building than information technology. This is not because people are reluctant to use information technology. It is because they often need to share knowledge that is neither obvious nor easy to document, knowledge that requires a human relationship to think about, understand and share. Ironically, while information technology has inspired the "knowledge revolution," it takes building human communities to realize it.

Many companies today are moving to a new organizational model in which cross-functional teams are the key building block of the organization. While cross-functional teams are great vehicles for producing products and services, they have some key limitations. Cross-functional teams can become insulated from each other, focusing on team goals and reinventing ideas and analyses from other teams. The "double-knit" organization links cross-functional teams together through communities of practice and enables teams to systematically learn from each other.

When defining the roles and responsibilities of your project team, don't forget the most important member -- the customer! In this article, Mike Aucoin gives us a compelling, real world example of clarifying what is expected from the customer and provides us with some guidelines for applying a Customer Role Review to your own projects.

A practical presentation that gets to the heart of how the risks and uncertainties we face on projects must influence how we manage. The core theme of this presentation, delivered at the IEEE International Conference on Management of Innovation and Technology in Singapore, is that the way you manage a project should be driven by the dominant type of uncertainty you are confronted with. The talk covers several types of uncertainty on projects, including complexity, schedule variability, foreseen risks, unforeseen risks, and market and technology "chaos". For each, it indicates the "Project Manager style" that best fits that type of project, and summarizes how the project manager would manage tasks and people on the project, during the planning stage and during the execution stage. This presentation is a great thought-provoker for anyone kicking off a project, as they select a project manager and team and determine how the project should be managed.

In many organizations, functions are king and getting work done cross-functionally is difficult at best. For years companies have tried to solve this problem by changing the culture or restructuring, but functional silos still don't necessarily cooperate with one another. Business processes are riddled with rework and long cycle times; projects are late and don't satisfy their customers. This paper by Paula Martin, who has extensive field experience with matrix organizations, discusses what it takes to make it all work, including getting alignment around goals, projects, and roles, achieving collaborative management, and what's required of individuals.

One of the biggest misconceptions today in companies trying to move toward a project environment is that tools are all you need to help manage projects successfully. In this article, Michael Martin points out that in order to effectively use PM tools, an organization must first have a consistent project management methodology that is understood and practiced throughout the organization.

Who minds the store in your company where your overall product development efforts are concerned? Who stays awake at night trying to figure out how to optimize your total investment of time and money in new products, figuring out how much you should diversify, what new products to add to a product line, which concepts to kill, how to balance the whole so that, at the end of the day, your ROI looks good? How efficient and effective is your decision-making process? More often than not, we're talking a senior management function. And too often we're talking about a slow process., IBM Personal Systems Group program manager Brian Montgomery discusses how to create an integrated steering team below the executive level to focus on portfolio management, and deploy staff resources to the portfolio management function, to bring business discipline to your development efforts.

Knowing how to successfully accomplish all the tasks, issues, and challenges a PM faces often requires more than formalized training. We need support mechanisms that help managers continually apply what they've learned in courses and expand their knowledge and capabilities as they encounter a wide variety of projects and situations. This presentation discusses how communities of practice and project support groups can promote ongoing knowledge and best practices exchange among their project managers, project facilitation and consulting help, and online how-to resources to ensure just-in-time learning throughout our projects.

This presentation discusses career options and career development for project managers, including our "customers" and how we can think about "marketing" to them; career-expanding skills - traits and behaviors that are valued by executives; PM-related career opportunities, and what skills matter most to each opportunity; and your career development plan - what you can do personally to grow your abilities in key areas and seek out the new opportunities.

This presentation is a great intro for companies thinking of implementing or in the process of implementing portfolio management for the first time, or companies who are thinking about how to use online resources to support managing their portfolio of projects. Dave Davis from AT&T gives his take on how portfolio management maps to a company's project management maturity - specifically how good you need to be at project management to have most success with a portfolio management process. He then covers important characteristics of a good portfolio management process, including project lists, project sponsors, understanding project value, and more. Finally, Dave covers a case study of how his group implemented an online "home page" for the portfolio, providing a web-based framework of the master project portfolio list and central access to key project documents and status.

What do you do when your company has to have a project completed in an unreasonable timeframe, or else? You get your cross-functional team together and hash out a one-to-two page consensus vision of what can realistically be done in the time available. Teams aligned to powerful product visions can finish projects rapidly. Using real project examples, this paper discusses how to arrive at a Vision, what it must contain to deliver a super-urgent project on time, and how to combat the number one reason for project slippage: changing product definitions that force teams to deal with a moving target.

Is conflict inevitable in projects? If conflict occurs how should a project manager, resolve it? The underlying premise of the PRE-EMPT method is that conflict resolution is a parallel activity to risk management. It is a daily, intentional effort. Just as risk, action items and issue logs should be addressed daily, so should the framework for resolving conflict. including both micro conflict (defined as conflict that occurs between individuals or within a team), and macro conflict (which occurs between the team and key stakeholders or external forces). This article was contributed by member David Kohrell, PMP, who is currently a Senior Project Manager with FiServ ITI and an experienced PM in both the public and private sectors.

This two-item set by Dr. Terry Cooke-Davies, Managing Director of Human Systems International Ltd., provides a paper and presentation on the concept of doing "project closeouts". At the end of a tough project, often no one is really interested in these late activities. The paper and presentation discuss activities that generally should be a part of project closeout management; why closeout is vitally important; the factors that prevent organizations from managing this time in the project effectively; a new perspective on project closeout management–its function as a part of a knowledge management system; and steps that organizations can take to improve the practice of project closeout.

A best-practices example of how an organization has specified its project management processes. Bonneville Power Administration, an electric utility, offers examples useful to organizations in unrelated industries.

This presentation covers concepts and techniques that the author has found extremely useful for introducing some high-impact project management fast. These techniques are especially helpful in organizations with little or no prior project management background and experience. The focus is on using techniques that do not involve a high level of project mechanics or new tools to help teams avoid problems that drive project failures. The techniques also do not require long process improvement efforts to see some fast results; they are simple to explain and implement, and they can be deployed just-in-time on a project. Key subjects include using team kick-off meetings, setting up relationships with outside vendors and development partners to avoid project-killing issues, and determining the highest leverage project techniques for your situation and getting them working on multiple teams fast.

There's no worse "super-urgent demand" than the looming end-date of a critical project that's behind schedule: a schedule that was probably highly aggressive to start with. Time-to-market demands can't be ignored, so how do you course-correct, get back your momentum, and succeed in spite of the setbacks? This paper, describes how to pinpoint and fully understand the project's past problems, revitalize your plan and your team, and get that product out the door.

Executives need to be aligned with our portfolio management approach, and contribute to decision-making in the right way, so that new projects are championed and interjected atop our current portfolio commitments in alignment with our portfolio strategy. This presentation, contributed by K.C. Yelin of ICS Group (http://www.icsgrp.com/), compares the role of a project portfolio manager to that of a "financial portfolio manager", and the executive to that of a client with a personal financial portfolio. The client communicates his financial goals and often decides the targeted allocation of assets, but does not select the individual investments in each asset category. The financial portfolio manager shares the performance of the portfolio relative to the client’s goals and counsels the client, allaying fears of situational ups and downs and keeping the focus on the longer term. This presentation discusses how to adapt the best of the financial portfolio–client model to the project portfolio–executive scenario.

Complex software systems often benefit from unit testing for implementation before moving to higher-level reliability tests. This overview of software unit testing -- contributed by Rodney Parkin, Technical Director of IV&V Australia Pty Ltd - defines the practice, as well as issues to consider when building unit testing into your overall plan. The discussion also includes factors like formality, thoroughness, and the best test environments for typical development projects.

You know that an effective project management process can help your organization achieve its business goals. So how do you convince the different levels of executive management? In this slide presentation, Bill Kern shows how to effectively champion the adoption of PM process by tailoring solutions and value propositions to each level and each individual in your management "audience".