APM Blogs

If you go to Reykjavík any time soon, you’ll be impressed by the cranes, construction sites and buzz around the diminutive Icelandic capital.

“To effectively communicate, we must realise that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others,” Tony Robins.

Project management is usually taught in a linear fashion and tends to follows this process: firstly, consider the personalities and skill set required to successfully complete the project, next, decide who the stakeholders are and develop a communication plan in order to be able to address them, after this, try to agree on the scope of the project and decide the deadline, following this, draw up a Gantt chart showing the timetable of your project and agree a budget to cover all the above, finally, once the project has ended, complete a review.

Why oh why do people keep going on about continuous professional development (CPD)?  Stop wasting my time.

Whilst two of the key statements within the agile manifesto are “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “Working software over comprehensive documentation”, anybody coming to the conclusion that this removes the need for strong project discipline or governance would be misguided.

The increasingly distant horizons associated with many of our major projects and programmes present a raft of well-documented problems: the continually shifting environment; the onward march of technology; the loss of expertise, experience and corporate memory as some of these very long projects outlive the teams that manage them, several times over.

It would be hard to blame a project professional if the thought of working with artistic or creative teams brings them out in a sweat.

In his recent post ‘How to give back to the profession’ long-time volunteer Russel Jamieson called for new passionate members to join APM’s Volunteering Steering Group (VSG) and add “some positive disruption” to the role.

As part of our upcoming Autumn Conference; Socialising the PMO: The PMO as an Enabler of P3 Communities, we plan to use all the experience brought by our speakers and partners to investigate the role of the PMO using methods and tactics such as social media, to engage with, build, enable, and encourage communities of practice within an organisation’s wider P3 community; whilst maintaining its key role as a governance and assurance function.

I've been working as a remote project manager and consultant for the past 12 years.