Posts Tagged ‘project management’

Great communication is one of the most important skills, if not the most important skill, a project manager can possess. I make this statement based on my experience in account and project management roles with different advertising/marketing agencies in Michigan and Colorado. These agencies differed in number of employees, service offerings and whether there were […]

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — By Leo Tolstoy

I’ve been thinking about some great project managers I’ve met over the years and what works for portal projects. In some ways, it could be said a good project manager should be a jack of all trades, master of none. The theory is that a person who masters both the art and science of project […]

While watching my daughter’s field hockey team compete last weekend, I came to realize that a project manager might learn a lot from a goalkeeper. To be a successful goalie, you need to approach goal tending just as a project manager might manage a project – as a leader, and with a practiced process. Let […]

Author: Amy Smith, Senior Project Manager, Perficient Well, I liked Dux Raymond Sy’s Keynote address so much at SharePoint Fest 2012 that I attended his session titled, “7 Ways to Empower Reluctant Project Managers with SharePoint 2013”.  Dux is the author of “SharePoint for Project Managers” and has a PMP certification.  But, most of the […]

Effective communication by BI teams creates better relationships with business users regardless of the development methodology employed.  Providing: a clear picture of the team’s service offerings before the project, project insight during the project, and ongoing visibility after the project are the triad of effective BI communication and are nearly always a significant part of […]

Recently I was in a conversation where a PM declared “Agile’s just waterfall really fast – we can do that no problem!”  Uh oh. Like (most) everything, delivery methodologies are subject to fashion and trend, and Agile/Scrum/Kanban and the like are en vouge.  Collective, I’ll refer to these highly cyclic methodologies as “iterative” or (little […]

Automate everything!  The mantra of the real developer – I’d rather spend 2 hours automating a task than 30 minutes of repetitive typing!  Continuous integration finally legitimizes that innate desire to automate during the development process. Continuous Integration (CI) tools automate the application build process and automated tests on a regular interval (or on demand […]

Documentation management (not document management!) is the rather narrow topic of how a development team manages the system specifications that are used throughout the life of a system.  In most teams, this is a huge blind spot with some teams simply not documenting much of anything and others spending an enormous amount of time (money) […]

Development management (or more traditionally “project management”) is concerned with identifying, scheduling, and tracking development workload.  I’ve started to differentiate development management from project management in line with the trend in many larger organizations who have tackled project portfolio management as a discipline. Basically, project management focuses on cost, risk, and value to the organization […]

When the topic of BI tools comes up with a client, the conversation inevitably starts with either the BI delivery tool or the ETL tool…maybe the DBMS.  But unless there are serious issues in these core platforms, I generally find that the real gaps are in one of the other, “forgotten” tool classes. Here’s the […]

Jared Spool shares good advice for design teams in his recent post “Putting An End To An Opinion War”. He observes that “Opinion wars kill design projects.” He shares two key ways to end an opinion war: using data to take decisions out of the realm of opinion appointing a final arbitrator These valuable tools […]