Today, no company can be immune to the current economic situation. So it is the time for many businesses to analyze their business model and risk profile.

Economics experts join their voices stating that the best thing you can do to withstand the crisis is to improve your customer service and be attentive to customer needs.  Terry Leahy, the head of TESCO, a British-based international grocery and general merchandising retail chain, noted in one of his recent interviews that staying close to customers is the key to surviving the current, difficult economic conditions. “We learned some lessons, and the message is simple – stay with your customers. Listen to your customers.”

For project managers, it’s important that you treat your customers as stakeholders.  John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and Kip Tindell (CEO of The Container Store), who drove their companies with a constant growth over good and bad times, explain their take on stakeholders in this very interesting interview. It’s a must-read for executives in the current economic conditions.


Read full article >

Financial crisis is all over the news today. Some analysts are trying to predict the future of the national and global economy. Others are offering tips on how to survive in the situation of economic turmoil. Yet almost all the analysts agree that it is no time to panic; rather, you should rethink your strategies.


Read full article >

I have already mentioned that many-to-many structures employed in project management 2.0 software offer a better way to organize your projects. Here is an interesting angle on the same topic.

Have you ever thought about how our mind organizes ideas? We do not organize all the information we know in one strict hierarchical tree, life is too diverse for that. Associations radiating out (or in) from many different connection points help our brain to navigate through a vast information pool and quickly make decisions. Many connections in many different directions connect items together. We could say that the structure in our mind is a network of connections or a many-to many structure.



Read full article >

Dave Prior and Bob Tarne have recently blogged about the so-called post-modern project management with a reference to Dr. Davidson Frame. Their idea is that there are lots of methodologies available, and that in real life, there can’t be just “one true way” for managing a project. Each project is unique, and each time we need to find a new way of managing and completing it, very often mixing several methods and techniques. This is the creative part of the project manager’s job. The project manager needs to be flexible and try to view his or her project from different angles to understand which methodology he or she should apply and how to use different methods together harmoniously. Here, the right tools will be a great help. Project management software should support a manager’s flexibility, giving him or her options to look at the same project from different perspectives.


Read full article >

In one of my recent posts I wrote that using project management 2.0 software helps project manager guide his team’s work, delegate some of his initial duties and allocate roles and responsibilities so that they are clear to everybody on the team. Project management 2.0 tools also let one apply some traditional methodologies of structuring responsibilities more effectively. Let’s take RACI as an example.


Read full article >

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is coming. No doubt it will be the most exiting conference of the year in the industry. This not-to-be-missed event is organized for those who are interested in making their business more productive and competitive with the new technologies, and you have a chance to attend the conference for free!


Read full article >

Hundreds of people are already looking forward to this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. One of the most interesting sessions during this conference last year was one by Leisa Reichelt. Leisa is interested in the changes going on in project management and she calls these changes Social Project Management or Project Management 2.0. At Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2007, she gave a presentation on Social Project Management, where she pointed out several distinctive features of the new wave in the project management discipline.  According to Leisa, they are: small teams, motivated people, limited planning, minimal scope, small projects, rapid release, responsiveness, and iterations. Leisa noted that the essential point of her presentation was that “there are other ways to manage projects than ye olde fashioned waterfall methodology.” According to her, these ways emerge in project management due to the penetration of social software into in the enterprise.


Read full article >

Top-down and Bottom-up Project Management: Leveraging the Advantages of the Two Approaches
Significant changes are taking place in management and especially project management today. We hear that organizations, like the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young switched from the so-called top-down management style to bottom-up management. Others, including some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, implemented bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments. The popularity of the bottom-up approach to management is growing. In spite of this fact, the discussions about the two major approaches are still hot. Why have organizations become so anxious about changing their management style? If we compare the two management approaches, the answer to this question will be clear. 

Read full article >

Today I would like to give a definition to the new term used by me in the title of this blog.

Read full article >

Every year and even every month, new technologies, markets and competitors spring up, and today’s businesses have to be agile to be able to face the impending challenges. In such an unstable environment, traditional principles of managing product development may lead companies to failure. If the product requirements change drastically from the time the product is designed to the moment when it is released, it can result in the delivery of outdated products. Otherwise, ineffective change management processes may destroy product development, and the product will never be delivered.

Read full article >