Karine Simard, an author on a Project Management Blog, called PMstudent.com,created an excel sheet to highlight the input and output parameters on each process within each of the 9 Process Groups and has released it on the internet.

One Commenter mentioned that it would be usefull to add the Tools and Techniques and that it would help to flowchart the inputs and outputs using MindMap or Visio.

How ever, when I passed my PMP exam around 3 years ago the table based approach helped a lot to understand the principal and to get it into my head.

via PMstudent.com

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings … We as Project Manager’s have to facilitate heeps of them. If you need to understand some ground rules how to open up and start a meeting you should look at this website and listen to the tips.

via Manager Tools

The National Intelligence Council has just released its Global Trends 2025 Study. Some of the key highlights addressed in this study talk about

The whole international system—as constructed following WWII—will be revolutionized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Russia, India and China— have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.
The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

One key aspect is significant and needs to be mentioned. The political and economic influencing power of the US will go down dramatically. The US Dollar is loosing its dominant role as the key currency. Food and resource shortages are becoming bigger. If was referring to that in my Key Note at the Project Risk Management conference and talked about the impact for Project Managers.

All that supports our strategy applied for the last couple of years. To have as many work options as possible. Not from an industry or profession perspective, but from a country perspective. If a nation is rising and you have the option to work there is mitigating your risk to suffer during the crises.

You can download the full Study here.

Another great book to read about the reasons why former nations have risen and fallen is The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes.

Just received an interesting email from Dominic Siow one of the great presenters in the Australian Project Land. He also run’s the website www.avantgardelife.com.au. In his email he is providing tips on how to provide and give and receive ‘feedback’.

Dominic mentions that …

… feedback is “the breakfast of champions”. Indeed it is one of the most powerful tools you can use to influence and reinforce change. This can apply to an employee, project stakeholder, child or even a friend!

The key tips are summarized and paraphrased by Dominic out of the Book ‘Top Performance’ by ‘Zig Ziglar’:

TIP #1: Be observant and on the constant look-out for the good in others. Reinforce positive behaviour and changes, however small, immediately. Feedback is most effective when it’s timely.

TIP #2: Offer feedback that is specific and sincere.

TIP #3: Use the “feedback sandwich”.

TIP #4: Criticize the performance, praise the performer.

TIP #5: The most important measure of the effectiveness of your feedback piece is - what emotional state have you left the recipient?

Read Dominic’s weekly distributed tips here.

After ‘Groups’ now ‘Applications’ have arrived at LinkedIn. Offered by other Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn has started its own integrated application option. First Steps in that area are integrated applications like Slideshare, Wordpress and Amazon. The focus of these baby steps are articulated in the promotion email:

… it’s a new way to create projects and collaborate, share information, customize your profile, or gain key insights …

First impression looking into these options could be expressed as a very basic but useful integration. Lots of us do publish slides on slideshare.net and the only way to show these to your target audiences is to integrated them in your blog (if you have one) or sending them a link to your slideshare profile or to link to your profile out of LinkedIn. Now there is a more visible option available. Just activate the Slideshare application (full guidance on that could be found here) and link to your slideshare profile. After you have done that your last three slides presentations published on slideshare do show up in your LinkedIn Profile.

The same applies to the Wordpress application. As it would be great to integrate your posts from your blog in LinkedIn and publish your posts there (at least the teasers) and make them aware to your LinkedIn profile visitors. After activating this application the result looks like this.

Finally applications arrived at LinkedIn. In the european market leader they havent arrived yet, but I am sure that the guys at XING.com are waorking on it. How ever, there are more than 5000 applications on Facebook (the innovator in that field) so the offerings to date are just a starting point and it will be fun to watch what is coming up. For now its an optimiyed way to publish your assets (presentations, blog entries etc.) in an easy into your LinkedIn profile and attract your visitors even more.

It has been a while back that we looked into the series how to present a risk profile to an audience.

The last time we discussed and looked at the standard way of presenting by the two axes likelihood and consequence. This time its about the “Heat Map“, an approach we have learned from Liam Wallace at the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference.

He uses the following picture to express a risk profile.

Its especially capable to show the level of risk in specific areas (eg. Human Resources, Financials etc.). As the two dimensions are “project” and “area” it can be used if you are managing a Programme of Work or a Portfolio or you are Manager of a PMO.

The key benefits are that you are able to identify areas of common risk in most of the projects.  For Example you have a financial risk in amber or red in most of your projects and all other areas are more or less green. That would clearly show that you have a common problem in the financial area.

You are also able to do the same on a project level. If one project has higher risks in most of the areas and all other projects show more or less green then there might be something wrong with that particular project.

The People attending the conference had very positive feedback on that chart as it is very powerful because of the reasons mentioned above.

Cornelius, just returned from Denver from the PMI Global Congress 2008, is rolling again. He has just released Podcast 106 where he explains how to deal with jerks in your project team (who hasnt had this kind of people in their team and had to call them “your greatest teacher”) and now he is coming back from Denver with a great new episode.

Cornelius Fichter interviewed Brantlee Underhill, she heads up the PMI’s Virtual Communities Project.

In a nutshell, this project aims at creating a unified and centralized infrastructure for all SIG activities. The bold step that the PMI is taking in creating this centralized approach is that the independent SIGs will be dissolved and reintegrated into the PMI itself.

As you can imagine, there are many viewpoints on such a move depending on which side of the fence you are on. Some think it’s a good idea and some don’t.

So, lets hear what Brantlee has to say about this new approach.

How ever, working in an organisation like PMI, whether its the Board or a special interest group, and a web that becomes more and more dominated by cloud computing and colaboration, the way how the chapters and SIGs have to work in nower days (at least here in Australia) could be called the stone age. I just have look into how we have to maintain our Queensland Chapter Website ….

Enjoy the talk and listen to it here or go to the PM Podcast website directly.

Update: Part 2 with a different opinion has just been released by Cornelius with Derry Simmel, who is the PMO SIG’s Vice Chair Membership. Listen to this episode here.

As i mentioned  in my keynote at the Project Risk Management conference this year, the world is changing, its becoming more complex and we have to stay on top, as project managers and individuals, to be able to ’survive’ and to be ’successful’ in that environment. 

Paola Antonelli, a MOMA design curator and a presenter at the famous ‘TED - Ideas worth spreading‘ events, held a presentation about “Design and the Elastic Mind” in December 2007 and it just got posted on the Ted.com website. The abstract reads like this:

MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli walks through the groundbreaking show “Design and the Elastic Mind” — full of ideas, products and designs that reflect the multi-tasking, quickly shifting way we think now. 

Watch the video here or go to the ted.com website.

Accenture has just released a new report about management capabilities and when they really matter. The title of that reports says it all: “When Good Management Shows: Creating Value in an Uncertain Economy”

A lot has been written and achieved in the last couple of weeks to face the global financial crisis. Some are impacted more some less. Looking at the reasons most of the articles do talk about the financial systems and its weaknesses. How ever, some companies are cruising their ship very carefully through these troubled waters and are able gain vs. their competition, others have major issues in keeping the boat on course and others sink their boat.

Accenture is looking at it from a different angle.

Lets look at the summary first:

Good times mask poor corporate performance, but it is during downturns that excellent management distinguishes itself. Accenture conducted in-depth research to investigate the performance of companies during a previous recession and uses the findings to outline the characteristics that set high-performance businesses apart from their competitors.

The main message is about what companies have done in good times to sustain the bad ones plus how to get ahead of your competition in bad times by focusing on areas that really matter (eg. cutting the right costs, investing money in the right things). It also gives great examples by looking at specific companies to get an understanding ‘how’ they have done it.

Another quote that targets at the same topic from one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin, right after they announced some unexpected quaterly results where they raised the revenue by 26% and profit by 31%.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin predicted the company will emerge from the turmoil even stronger. “My favorite time to manage is during a bust,” Brin said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press. “It brings more clarity about what your customers need and what your priorities should be.”

Another way of identifying what areas you need to focus on and how to prioritize specific planned initiatives in your companies portfolio. If you are strong in good times and prepared your self to surrender the bad times you can gain a lot when others are suffering.

Another quote that supports this argument has been made by, Laura Wright, chief financial officer of the Dallas-based discount airline “Southwest Airlines”:

Southwest did not have significant exposure to the problems with the nation’s financial system.

…

Credit markets are certainly ugly right now, but we’re in a good position for these turbulent times.

…

Bottom Line, prepare yourself in the good times to face the bad.

the airline’s modest debt load, its $6 billion in cash reserves, and its fuel hedging program as reasons for its financial stability. Southwest also doesn’t have significant capital obligations coming up, having already accepted 26 of the 29 airplanes it currently plans to add to its fleet.

Bottom Line, prepare yourself in good times to successfully face the bad and this report might give you new ideas how to do that.

The PM Podcast, compiled by Cornelius Fichtner, is an institution already. 106 episodes have been produced and broadcasted to a wide audience for years.
This new episode, episode 106, is about how to Control yourself when working with jerks. The Author comments it like this:

Well… we have all been in this situation on our projects and luckily, there is help there is help just around the corner. And that help comes to you in the form of Margaret Meloni, MBA, PMP. She has been a regular guest here on the Podcast and because all of us know a jerk or two (or have sometimes been a jerk ourselves) Margaret is going to open up her resource toolkit for us and help us deal with the jerk on our project team.

You can listen to the Episode right here.