Author: Linky

Linky

Leadership Skills for Project Managers

Leadership skills for project managers Good leadership skills are what make a good project manager great. This article will explore the attributes that would make the project manager a great leader.

Inspire a Shared Team Vision

For a project to work, everybody needs to share the same vision for the project. Great project managers help all team members feel like they have an equal stake in a project, and empower everyone to share and experience the group’s vision.  When team members share a similar vision, they are committed to deliver their best.

Integrity

Good leadership requires commitment and adherence to ethical practices. Good project managers abide by ethical standards and reward those team members who follow suit is part of the responsibility of the job.

Great Communication Skills

Project managers need to clearly communicate goals, performance and expectations; and they need to manage feedback coming at them from all directions.  Being accessible, open, and direct is critical for being a good communicator. Further, having the ability to persuade team members to do certain tasks a bit differently, or work overtime when necessary, is equally as important.  Overall, a project manager’s overall effectiveness is often realized by the ability to communicate effectively.

Competency in the Subject Matter of the Project

Team members need to feel like their project manager has some degree of expertise in the project’s subject matter. As such, project leaders should have the ability to lead their team with technical expertise if the project so requires it. Leaders who are seen as competent by their peers have the ability to inspire, enable and encourage.

Promote Team Building

A project manager must understand team building dynamics.  He or she must go through each phase of team development – even when conflict arises – and get the team to focus on the common goal.   Great project managers foster a sense of unity on the team, across personal dynamics.

Good with Task Delegation

Assigning the right tasks to the right people and trusting them to leverage the best of their abilities is a key characteristic of a great project manager.

Good Problem Solving Abilities

Great project managers solve problems by sharing the responsibility with the experts on their team. This means leveraging the knowledge of those team members and stakeholders who have the expert knowledge to assist; and setting a plan to solve tough problems by harnessing that team experience.

Stay Cool Under Pressure

In a perfect world, every project would complete on time, on budget, and on scope. Unfortunately, when the going gets tough, good project managers remain calm. Warrant Bennis stated: “Out of the uncertainty and chaos of change, leaders rise up and articulate a new image of the future that pulls the project together.”  Great project managers stay cool under pressure.

I like this definition of Leadership: “leading is about establishing direction and influencing others to follow that direction”. This is a good indicator of how project managers should lead their project teams.

As a project manager you lead and facilitate the team members to work towards the same goal consistently.

About Linky van der Merwe: Linky is the Founder of Virtual Project Consulting. Her mission is to provide project management best practices and to recommend resources to aspiring and existing project managers.  A certified project management professional with more than 13 years project management experience and a track record of more than 30 successful projects.

Linky

Project Management Leadership Master Class

By Kiruben Reddy

Project Management LeadershipThis promotional article is aimed at seasoned project and programme managers in South Africa who aspire to be more successful and outstanding in how they deliver projects. The information to be presented will also apply to CEO’s, Managing/ Project/Chief Directors, Engineering Directors, Project Leaders, Operations Executives, COO’s, HOD’s, I.T. Directors, Municipal Managers, Financial Project Managers, Team Leaders, Project Planning Managers, Business Analysts, Construction Managers.

Organisations more than ever are under pressure to operate and deliver more effectively and efficiently, place greater emphasis on stream-lining internal operations, increase focus on customer needs, on superior service delivery in relation to competitors and within shorter timeframes. This is necessary to retain their existing customer base as well as to increase their market share. With the current rate that Companies are moving at globally, coupled with the pace of change, now more than ever an organisation’s ability to execute (on time, on budget, to stakeholder expectations) is not only good for business but is a necessity.

This shift in mind-set requires organisations to have the ability to manage and effectively utilize their resources to the best of their ability to derive direct tangible value through the projects they initiate.

The Project Management Leadership Master Class will provide you with the essential insights in today’s industry and project efficiencies and touch on what’s required today to initiate, manage, monitor and drive delivery through the life cycle of a project successfully. Delivery is not only measured by the fact that it was brought to existence, but the manner in which it was executed and whether it is in line with the original expectations and business benefits of what it was intending to deliver.

Key strategies to be discussed, include:

  • Implementation of a project lifecycle methodology
  • Risk Management
  • How to deal with shortage of project management skills in South Africa
  • Achieving project results through our people

For more information, download the Project Management Leadership Master Class brochure and register for this today.

About the Author: Kiruben Reddy is the General Manager of Solutions Bridge, a 100% Black Women Empowered company and is Level 3 B-BBBEE certified. Your organization can recognize 110% of your spend for the Leadership Master Class hosted by them.

Linky

Project Managers – How To Find Happiness In Your Job

By Ryan Sauer

How to find your dream jobToday’s article is about matching your work style with a dream job. It shows how you can assess your strengths and skills; then how to create a transition plan to move you towards your new job.

Working in a field and within a work setting that matches your own instinctive abilities and workplace needs can make a world of difference in how you perceive your job and your goals.

The Conative Connection

When people place themselves in a role that matches innate work styles then the job feels right. You know the feeling even if you have never heard of the theory.

When people are most unhappy in a professional situation it is often because the job they are doing doesn’t match their inherent talents or desires. The Kolbe Index made me re-consider my career path and also see co-workers differently. Someone I perceived as stubborn in my other part-time workplace, I began to see as having a different way of problem-solving as me, and so I needed to shift communication tactics when dealing with that person.

Overall, the assessment provides insight into four main categories of instinctive “action modes” that people inherently use for creative problem-solving; these are:

  • Fact Finder – addresses the innate process an individual uses to gather and share information.
  • Follow Thru – addresses the “arrange and design” part of the work process.
  • Quick Start – addresses the way “risk and uncertainty” is interpreted and acted upon.
  • Implementer – addresses elements of dealing with “space and tangibles.”

The test then matches those indicators on a continuum of workplace strengths such as being able to: “specify, maintain, modify, and imagine,” among others. For each area people have varying degrees of innate tendencies; working with a team that is balanced across the continuum makes for a highly effective workplace.

Work Style and Happiness
Knowing your work style can help you narrow down the sorts of jobs that best match your conative ability (and also clarified for me the type of work environment or team that I was or was not willing to collaborate with in the future).

It also gives you glimpses of what your perfect job would be and lays a foundation for getting there. Here are some job ideas in growing fields based upon a few highly simplified work style tendencies:

If your passion is being analytical and seeing a problem through until its completion then these areas might be a good fit:

If you are more inclined to work on a sustained problem alone and in general feel the need to interact with people less, then here are some growing career fields would allow for that flexibility:

  • ROI methodology;
  • forensic accounting; and
  • IS security.

If it turns out that working with big ideas and using your innate charisma to influence teams and sustain growth is your passion then these areas might be a good match:

  • Six Sigma Leadership;
  • HR management; and
  • Business administration leadership.

Transitioning Smoothly
By and large everyone I have ever known that took the Kolbe Index found long lasting insights that are directly applicable to life at the present moment. You might feel that overwhelming sense to jump boldly on over to new meadows. Channeling some of that energy into creating a plan first is a great idea. Consider the following before your take the leap on over to your dream job:

  • Take a few online classes while you are still employed at your old job to be sure you have what it takes to be competitive for the transition.
  • Attend a few of the local chapter meetings held by professional organizations in the field(s) you are considering.
  • Attend a regional conference to learn more about key topics in the field, career growth, and employment opportunities.
  • Join LinkedIn and participate in forums related to your prospective field.
  • Explore volunteer or paid internship positions (most professional organizations have lists of opportunities on their homepage).
  • Identify an affordable and knowledgeable career coach and create a more detailed time line and action plan for the transition.

In a tough economy competitions for jobs is fierce; passion for a job is not enough to secure employment. Creating a strong transition plan will keep you focused on you dream, but also able to feed yourself in the meantime.

Ryan Sauer is a writer and editor for Bisk Education in association with University Alliance. He actively writes about project management and leadership in different industries and strives to help professionals succeed in getting their PMP certification online.

Linky

Calling on Project Managers to Share Success Stories

Lessons Learned but Knowledge Lost!

This was the title of an editorial that was published by David Pells in PM World Today in 2011. It was about the loss of experience and knowledge that was occurring as project managers retired.  While this is particularly pertinent in South Africa where skills shortage is considered an acute concern, it is clear that this is a global phenomenon.

The reality is that in spite of all the technology that is available to us today, we have not yet found a presentation format that captures the essence of this wisdom in a way that is relevant to future usage, readily searchable and easy to store.  It needs to be shared with present and future generations in a format that’s interesting and easy to use.  This highlights the significance of project management, knowledge management and the lessons learned process.

Lessons Learned Discussion

Recently there has been a lively discussion about Project Lessons Learned on the Association of Project Management (APM) blog.  A few key take-aways are shared here in order to understand how various individuals and companies have dealt with this requirement.

  • Some organisations have a more proactive approach and would gather in PM forum meetings specifically to share lessons learned from all projects from the whole PM team. This heightens awareness of problems, lets you see where the same thing is a happening and find solutions to prevent them from happening again.  It also allows you to highlight the good things and not just focus on the problems.
  • The documenting of lessons learned on most projects is not particularly good.  In many cases it isn’t done at all.  Where it is undertaken (often only because it is mandated by corporate procedures) it is all too often seen as a tick in the box exercise.  At least it sometimes is done.  What almost never happens is a review of relevant lessons reports by new projects.
  • Some individuals create a Lessons Log during Project Start-up and record anything that could help to create a best practice for my projects.  The Lessons Log is reviewed regularly along with the RAIDs (Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies) management documents at Checkpoint Meetings and Gate Reviews.  This really makes a difference when populating the Lessons Log and makes the job of writing the lessons into the End-of-Project Report so much easier.  (Colin Hewson, APM blog)

Lessons Learned a Contributor to Success

An interesting finding was published by Cranfield University School of Management. They conducted research to find out what helps projects to succeed or contributes to failure.  They have found that the biggest differentiating factor between organisations that generally succeed with their projects and those that don’t is “the willingness to publish and distribute lessons learnt”.

Therefore it’s not enough to close out the project and to create a Lessons Learned report – the reports have to be made available to others in a way that makes them want to read and apply. The key capability here is communication and some best practices could be:

  • organising the critical information in a way that makes it appear relevant and easy to understand,
  • making the different stakeholder groups aware that the information is available,
  • ensuring that stakeholder know where to find it,
  • arrange things so that they can quickly turn the information presented into useful actions.

Unfortunately, most lessons learned, although captured, are not being communicated out, and key learnings mostly remain with the individuals involved.  Also, for major complex projects, what you can actually capture in a report is only a small percentage.  The only way real learning gets shared is through conversation.

Certainly access to historical information in the form of validated lessons learned will be a valuable way of helping people who want to deliver successful projects. The challenge is developing a way to make the information accessible.

Case Study: London 2012 Olympics

An excellent example of capturing lessons learned, disseminating it and applying it immediately is the Learning Legacy Project of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) who was responsible for the London 2012 Summer Olympics. The Learning Legacy Project was developed to share the knowledge and lessons learned from the London 2012 construction project for the benefit of industry projects and programmes in the future, for academia and the government.

Reports and related information from the Learning Legacy have been categorised into ten themes on this website. Each theme contains short reports, tools and templates, case studies and research summaries that document how this area of work was approached and the lessons that have been learned and the successes that could benefit others.

Learn Your Lessons

Here are a few suggestions to ensure that we learn our lessons from past projects and that the knowledge is transferred across to future projects.

  • Create a plan for recording lessons learned at the end of each project life cycle phase.  This can be done in the form of formal team meetings, to simply requesting that people post to a discussion board, wiki, or some other form of media. Reference: “Learn your lessons” blog, Projects at Work by John D’Entremont.
  • If an ongoing process of capturing lessons learned cannot be followed, consider conducting a closing review once your project is complete. A post-project review can serve two important purposes.  It obviously aids in the collection of project historical data that can be shared, but it can also be a means of validating the work that your project team accomplished. The acknowledgement of work being done well provides good closure to the team members and a sense of achievement.
  • A more Agile principle is recommended by Anthony Mersino, founder of The Agile PMO, for teams to reflect at regular intervals, on how to become more effective, then to tune and adjust their behaviour accordingly.  The teams need to be communicating and collaborating on what works well, what doesn’t work so well, and then use that to make change. It is discussed, debated even, and it becomes part of the teams shared journey and collective memory.  The advantage of this approach is that you can immediately incorporate what you learned.

The PMO’s role in Lessons Learned is to make sure the teams are conducting retrospectives on a frequent and regular basis and incorporating the lessons learned into their planning.

Success Stories Shared Framework

As you can see from the Lessons Learned debate and the Learning Legacy project, this is a challenge that our current generation of project managers need to face and solve. In an attempt to capture the wisdom and transfer the knowledge to future projects, a framework is proposed.

This is to collect Success Stories from experienced project/programme managers in order to share experiences and to promote learning across the project and programme management community of South Africa and abroad.

Would you like to become involved with the Success Stories Shared initiative?

Please visit the Success Stories Shared page and send me an email should you wish to participate and to make a contribution in leaving a legacy to future projects and generations.

About the Author:

Linky van der Merwe is a Project Management Consultant who has worked in various industries including IT with various Microsoft Consulting customers in private and public sectors, Telecommunications (Vodacom), Retail (Woolworths) and Financial Services (Santam).

She is also the Founder of Virtual Project Consulting, an online company dedicated to equip and empower new project managers on how to become professional project managers, and to support existing project managers by recommending training, software, books and products. She educates through her blog by giving practical advice on project management processes, templates and tools based on best practices. She contributes to publications and by giving talks on relevant topics.

Linky

Can Social Media Drive Project Success?

Can social media drive project success? Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives in South Africa. Recent studies have revealed that South African consumers have a very high motivation (70 percent versus, for example, 40 percent in the UK) to follow brands on social networks.  We use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking services to converse with friends and colleagues and to share photos, videos, and important moments in our lives.

Worldwide, Facebook enjoys 80 million unique visitors per month, YouTube 800 million and Twitter 160 million, according to DoubleClick Ad Planner.  In South Africa, users spend on average seven hours a week on social networking sites, with MXit and Facebook being the most popular sites.

Against the back-drop of these statistics Project Managers need to seriously consider the integration of social media with their project management tools. Let’s look at ways to do that and to evaluate if the use of social media tools can drive project success. Some aspects of security and confidentiality will also be covered.

In a previous article: “10 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Project Management” we referred to a number of different social media tools available to project managers which can be used for project delivery. Many social media tools are more widely adopted by project managers than we think.

Social Media adoption

Many social media tools like collaboration tools, instant messaging, podcasts, webinars and social networks are already used widely for project delivery.

Podcasts and webinars are especially used for further training of professional project managers, PMP’s, who gain professional development units (PDU’s) for attending. Project management training companies, like Roeder Consulting, hosts a webinar every month presenting project management topics, as well as inviting host speakers, with the audience being able to claim a PDU per session.  Attendees are also invited to become members of their LinkedIn group. This has grown them a large following and keeps them front of mind for training needs.

Social media tools which may be considered more during project delivery are blogs (project information distribution to virtual teams), Wiki’s and RSS, to subscribe to feeds relevant to your project or to information that will help develop project managers who are reporting into a Project Support Office (PMO).

Security and Confidentiality

By nature social media implies collaboration, mutual trust, and a strong sense of common purpose. With social media your company and project needs a policy the same way as you need a policy for the use of email or the internet. Ensure that employees and team members know about the policy and follow an education program to ensure compliance with regulatory and legal guidelines.

Security concerns around the open flow of communication using social media tools can be addressed by using access controls to manage the flow of data. Give usernames and passwords to only those people who need to log in. Access control administration can be delegated to a PMO or a project support officer. Have a process for requesting access to the tool. For third parties requests, access may be limited by assigning permissions to certain “views” only. Some social media tools have an audit trail facility with which you can track changes.

Include social media tools in the company backup processes and business continuity plans. Another consideration around authorized software is to allow only social media tools that are supported by your IT department in order to not make you vulnerable to viruses and other security threats.

With proper consideration, project managers and their teams could adopt appropriate social media tools and by following the proper channels to put approved social media tools in place, this will enhance successful project delivery.

BIO: Linky vd Merwe is a certified project management professional (PMP) and Founder of Virtual Project Consulting.  She has been a senior project manager at Microsoft Consulting Services South Africa for the past 4.5 years.  She likes to blog about project management and integrated online communication marketing. Her mission is to provide project management best practices advice and to recommend resources to aspiring and existing project managers.

Linky

Stakeholder Management: Stakeholder Analysis in Five Steps

Guest Post by Joe Schembri

stakeholder analysisStakeholders are critical to the success of any project and should be included in every major assessment and decision.  Stakeholders are defined as the ones who are positively or negatively affected by the course of the project and any resulting solutions or conclusions. This article covers a most important aspect of stakeholder management, namely stakeholder analysis.

Because of their influence, stakeholders can create a positive or negative impact on the project or organization, so it is important to identify your project’s stakeholders from the beginning, learn what they anticipate and give them the attention and consideration they expect.

Stakeholder Analysis

stakeholder analysisStakeholders are typically categorized into two groups – primary or secondary stakeholders. Those who are directly impacted by the project are the primary stakeholders and secondary stakeholders are those who are indirectly impacted. Primary or secondary stakeholders can also be key stakeholders, a group which includes anyone with the power or position to exert significant influence over the project or the organization itself.

Since stakeholders can have such an impact on the success of a project, proper stakeholder management is essential. Conducting a stakeholder analysis is part of effective stakeholder management. Here are five steps to follow.

#1 Identify

A proper stakeholder analysis allows project managers to identify individuals or groups that are likely to affect, or be affected by, the project and how to best communicate with them.

#2 Sort

During the analysis, project managers will also sort and group stakeholders according to their level of impact. This information is then used to determine how stakeholder needs and interests should be handled during the course of the project.

#3 Interview stakeholder analysis

At this point in the stakeholder analysis, it’s usually a good idea to interview a sample of people from each stakeholder group to find out what they know about the project, their thoughts on the project, and what is most and least appealing about the project to them.  This allows the project managers to have a first-person stakeholder perspective on what stakeholders expect to get out of the project and what they believe the project will do for them or their department.

#4 Analyze

Then, analyze the results of the interviews by recording repeated themes, concerns, and issues for each group and sort them by priority.

#5 Record

Once project managers have successfully identified the stakeholders, developed an understanding of their concerns, and sorted them in order of priority, they can effectively use this information to help gain support for the project. All of the collected information should be recorded on a stakeholder map, which can then be used to develop detailed plans for communication with each stakeholder.

At this point, project managers should be able to identify how they will leverage each stakeholder group to help accomplish the project goals. Of course, gaining the support of stakeholders is just one small part of managing a successful project, but with the influence that they can have on a project, stakeholder analysis is one of the most important things to consider when planning an efficient and successful project.

What are some of your stakeholder analysis tips? Please add to the comments!

About Joe Schembri: Joe is with University Alliance. He writes about various project management topics including stakeholder analysis and PMI’s Project Management Professional certification exam.

Linky

Social Media Savvy Project Management

Since social media has become mainstream in the business world, this article is asking the question if social media tools have been adopted by project managers to improve successful project delivery. Also view the previous articles: 10 Ways to integrate Social Media with Project Management and Project Managers are you Twitter Smart?

Project managers use various tools like email, tele-conferences and video-conferencing on a daily basis, but are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams spread out over the globe, virtual teams working from different locations, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

Have a look at this presentation from Trevor Roberts to see what I mean.

The Social Media Project Manager
Hi! Welcome to Virtual Project Consulting. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe via the RSS feed. New to project management or aspiring to become a project manager? Please subscribe to the Blog (to the right) and receive The Short Guide to becoming a PMP. Thanks for visiting!

 

 

Linky

Project Managers are you Twitter Smart?

Twitter for project managers While many project managers are social media active today, there are still organizations which don’t understand the value of using social media, and specifically Twitter, in the work-place. This is a follow-up article on the previous social media article: 10 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Project Management

The value that Twitter can bring, is a whole new perspective on project management and this article will look at ways for project managers to become Twitter smart.

While Twitter is recognized as a social media tool that can assist with successful project delivery, it is often not taken seriously as a business tool. This is simply because of the vast amount of information that is available on Twitter at any one time–over 250 million tweets per day. To ensure that Twitter is a valuable tool, you need to be able to extract only information which is most relevant for you; otherwise, it defeats the object of improving project delivery. One way to do this is by using the #PMOT hashtag.

#PMOT

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, hashtags are a way to flag something, and “PMOT” stands for Project Managers (or Management) on Twitter. When you combine hashtags with Twitter you have an easy way to locate much of the PM-related content on Twitter in a single place.

How to become Twitter Smart

Here are some recommended practices to help you benefit from #PMOT:

  • Identify people that you want to follow. Add them to a list. Be cautious not to try and follow hundreds or thousands of people, because you cannot possibly keep track of that volume of Tweets.
  • Identify blogs, articles, sites that you can bookmark.  #PMOT can act almost like an automated Google search for you–bringing search results to you without you having to go and work to find them.
  • Identify curators – people who make the effort to find the best content and make it available with their own comments.  There are plenty of project management sites that have a great daily publication.
  • Stay current with what’s happening in your industry and profession. There are many industry organizations who actively contribute to Twitter (PMI, for example). Twitter can give you an easy way to stay current with what is happening with them.
  • Find other activities to become a part of. #PMOT will lead you toward #pmchat, for example–an hour-long, weekly Twitter conversation from 12—1 p.m. North American Eastern time that gives you a chance to interact with other PMs and discuss topics/issues of the day. (If you miss the live chat there is a record of the conversation on Twitter under the #pmchat hashtag.)
  • You still need to use judgment in consuming this content–there’s no point in bookmarking 100 different project management sites as you can’t possibly keep track of them all while still doing the job that you are employed to do.

Twitter for Organizational use

By now you can appreciate using Twitter as a personal tool for individual PMs, but there is also a lot of benefit for the organization. Consider how Project Management Offices (PMO’s) can use Twitter to improve project effectiveness and streamline processes. A tremendous amount of content is already developed to assist in the continuous improvement of the PMO, and much of it is available within the public domain.

Twitter not only helps to socialize the availability of that content–it can assist the organization in connecting with people who have used it before and share their experiences. It may also be used to initially connect with those people.

For organizations that have a page on their intranet containing links to websites that offer best practices, hints and tips, you can prevent that content to become outdated by using the #PMOT. This will help you find a lot of content that can be applied to your organization and to keep that links page fresh.

Be Twitter Smart by contributing

Twitter is not only a social media tool to consume content, but it also provides opportunities to contribute to Twitter discussions. When you represent an organization, as long as you keep to your company’s social media policies, you can use Twitter to do formal announcements, share information on the corporate website like job opportunities for example, share tips and tools etc.

As Project Managers we can also contribute as part of the PM community. This can be achieved by sharing your knowledge and experiences on Twitter by posting a useful link or a lesson learned. This way you can connect with people who have common interests and goals.

Conclusion

As a PMP and blogger, I’ve been using Twitter for a few years for all the reasons above. It has helped me to connect with project managers from all over the world, to easily find good information and RSS feeds to keep up to date with the Project Management Industry and of course, for exposure so that more people will find me and my blog about project management best practices and tools as well as recommended resources. Please subscribe here.

If you would like a head start on Twitter, you are welcome to follow me: Virtualpm

Here are my lists that I have created over time and lists that I follow:

Don’t forget to use Search #PMOT on Twitter to build your own lists or to find good lists to follow.

About the author: Linky Van Der Merwe is the Founder of Virtual Project Consulting. She is a Project Management Consultant and an IT Project Manager for the past 12 years and currently working at Microsoft Consulting Services.

Linky

10 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Project Management

For the past 3 years I was active on various social media platforms, especially since I’ve been blogging about Project Management. Initially my intention with social media was to become more visible and to attract free traffic to my website. What I realise now, is that social media has already become integrated with Project Management and is more widely adopted by project managers than we think. The purpose of this article is to have a look at 10 social media tools that are available to project managers to use during project delivery.

Social Media for project managers According to Elizabeth Harrin, author of “Social Media for Project Managers” Project Management Institute, there are a number of different social media tools available to project managers.  We will look at ten tools with a short description of what they mean.

 

  1. Blogs: In the project setting, it is the equivalent to a project notebook or a shared project log. Blogs are made up of posts, which are short articles that appear in reverse chronological order on the blog. Blogs have an archive facility which will display historical posts by day, week, or month.
  2. Collaboration tools: Software solutions that are designed to help manage teams and get the job done. They are used for storing of all project information, contacts, documents, and discussion in one place. Consequently, the software becomes the main place for project team members to go for updates on tasks and to work with other people.
  3. Instant messaging: A way of sending short text messages to colleagues through the computer. It is similar to email, but faster and with shorter messages, because you know the person is at the other end available to reply. You can see a list of colleagues and their status as to whether they are available to message or not, which saves you contacting someone who is unavailable. This is called “presence” and can extend to other types of technologies as well.
  4. Microblogs: This is blogging on a very small scale. It allows you to send short messages to the internet for public consumption. The most popular microblogging tool today  is Twitter (http://twitter.com) which limits the update to 140 characters, the length of a text message on a mobile device, and also permits your “tweets” to be protected if you would prefer that they are only seen by your friends. As with a blog, the tweets appear on your homepage in a long chronological stream, with the most recent comments at the top.
  5. Webinars: A seminar hosted on the web. It is also used to describe other types of meetings where the participants go to a website to see the presentation material.  Participants use their web browser to access a website for that meeting.
  6. Podcasts:  Audio files that are listened to either through your computer’s speakers or through a download to an MP3 player.  A podcast is an on-demand audio file delivered regularly through a mechanism that allows people to subscribe to the latest episodes, like RSS.
  7. Vodcasts: A video podcast; video on demand delivered regularly through a mechanism that allows people to subscribe to the latest episodes, like RSS. Think mini-TV series. Vodcasts are typically not that long and are designed to be watched on small screens.
  8. RSS: RSS for Virtual Project Consulting

It stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s called syndication because, like a news syndicate, information is sent to multiple channels at a time.  This allows you to subscribe to updates. Every time a new news article is posted, the RSS feed is updated and, as a subscriber, you will get the update. There are software tools (called RSS readers like Google Reader, or aggregators) which organize all your feeds in one place.

9. Social networks:  Online groups that are designed to bring people with common interests together. You can connect with friends that you know both in the real world and those friends that you have never met in person. Individuals create a profile which includes details about themselves and normally a photo. From your profile you can connect to others. LinkedIn and Facebook are two of the most popular social networks today.

10. Wikis: ‘Wiki’ is Hawaiian for “quick.” It’s also an acronym for “What I Know Is.  A wiki is a collection of web pages that are written by a group of people, normally on a particular topic—your project, in this case. The wiki acts as a knowledge repository. Wiki software makes it easy to add pages and link them to other pages, which creates a hyperlinked data set. In essence, a Wiki can form the collective knowledge from your project team, organized in web page format.

Please let me know in the comments section which of the social media tools you’re using or perhaps other social media tools?

Do you think that these tools help you with project delivery?

Linky

Project Management Infographic – Top Project Management Software

When you need to make a decision about which project management or collaboration software to use, there are many factors to consider. I have found this infographic that highlights some of the most important solutions in this space and uses publicly available information to explain how they vary in terms of company size, popularity, social media presence, ease of integration, trust factors and mobile applications availability.

You can click on the company logos and then you will be directed to GetApp.com where you can view a product description as well as user reviews when available.

The purpose of the infographic is to offer you information on important decision factors so you can decide which project management solution is the best fit for your business.

For a more comprehensive list of over 150 web-based project management software options, please check GetApp.com’s online project management software directory.

Linky

Project Management South Africa Launches Online Recruitment System

online recruitment
Are you a Project Manager based in South Africa? Are you looking for a new challenge in Project Management?

Or do you have vacancies on your project team that you would like to advertise to a targeted group of project professionals?

Project Management South Africa (PMSA) has just launched a new online resource that allows PMSA members to upload their CVs to a searchable database. A CV summary is then viewable by subscribed recruitment agencies and fellow members. If a CV summary sparks interest, the candidate will receive an email request to release the full CV for viewing by the requesting party.

Agencies and companies pay a subscription fee to advertise jobs and search CVs on the recruitment system, while individual members, RETPs and corporate members may upload vacancies free of charge.

To view existing CV’s or to load your CV, go to www.projectmanagement.org.za and click on ‘