​The classic 1975 British comedy film concerning the Arthurian legend, written and performed by the Monty Python comedy group is a cult classic, one of my favourite movies to quote from and funny if you get the sense of humour. Not a high budget movie, but somehow it works. And as I was showing clips of its funniest scenes to my kids the other day, I realised that the movie also could teach us some important concepts about project management. It may be a stretch, but let's consider...
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Overconfidence may cut you off at the knees. Well that or leave you legless and armless in the case of the Black Knight. The Black Knight responds with “tis but a scratch” as his first extremity is removed by King Arthur's sword. Eventually his stubbornness, and failure to admit defeat or work with his issue at hand, causes him to lose all four extremities. If we are too stubborn on our projects, stick to bad decisions in the face of better judgement and information, or refuse to work with our adversaries (sometimes the client?) in a productive manner to accomplish goals, we may fail miserably and lose our limbs in the process. Best practices and logical choices = success. Communication and collaboration = success. Stubbornly holding our ground in the worst scenario and stating “none shall pass” may result in much blood loss...

Good, better, best. If we are dedicated to our profession, we usually always want to be improving. Granted, there are those days and weeks when we are just trying to keep our heads above water and we can't think about improving...just maintaining. I get that. I've been there. In fact, I feel like I'm there right now...at least this week. But I do want to improve, become more organized, serve my clients better and increase my chances at being more successful on each project I manage and on each consulting engagement I take on. I'm guessing you feel the same.

That said, let's consider some ways - beyond just great PM and PPM tools - we can improve as project manager right away. There are things we can do in the long term – like take a class or attend a conference. But those usually cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and have to be scheduled well in advance. What I want to discuss are things we can do now...today...tomorrow...this week, in order to improve ourselves as managers of projects for customers and teams we are working with right now.

How tough is your business analyst? Well, mine was pretty tough and this actually happened on a project I was leading for a Chicago client. Probably not my best moment as a project lead, but you can read more about it and what happened next in my upcoming article on BA Times - the article goes live later this month on 11/24/2019. Stay tuned!

The motivated team is the more productive team. That's a fairly well established fact. As the project manager or PMO director how do you get there? How do you make sure your project teams are as motivated and engaged as possible every time out on every project?
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As usual, I have some thoughts and opinions - coming from experience, logic and observation – that result in my personal list of six key tips to keep your project teams focused on the end goal...

Product Owner

The product owner establishes a sprint goal, which is used to identify which product backlog items will be worked on during the sprint.

Scrum Master

The Scrum Master acts as the facilitator, ensuring that effective discussion takes place. They gain agreement on the sprint goal and identify which product backlog items will be included in the sprint backlog.

The Scrum Master is also responsible for keeping the event within it’s time-box; as a guide, a maximum of eight hours is allocated per one-month sprint.

The Project Team

The wider project team members estimate how many product backlog items they will be able to complete, and detail how they will deliver those items.

Sprint Planning Structure

Typically, sprint planning is divided into two parts, scope and plan.

Scope

A prioritized list of product backlog items is offered, from which the team identify which items they will be able to complete during the sprint. The team must ask themselves various questions during this part of the planning process.

• What is the sprint goal?
• Which items from the product backlog are ready and will contribute towards the success of the sprint goal?
• What is the availability of the project team during this sprint?
• Based on this availability, what is the team’s capacity?
• Which items will be included on the sprint backlog based on this capacity?
• Do the team feel confident that they will be able to meet the sprint goal?

Plan

During part two, detailed discussions will take place between the project team about how the product backlog items selected will be delivered. Tasks for the product backlog items will be identified, any dependencies between items will be highlighted and team members will be allocated to product backlog items.

Benefits of Sprint Planning

Sprint planning gives the project team a shared understanding of the sprint’s end goal and the work that they will complete to reach that goal. It also provides an initial plan as to how the team will approach the work.

Downfalls of Sprint Planning

The strength of sprint planning depends upon having a refined product backlog list from which the team can draw items. Where there isn’t a refined list, sprint planning will be ineffective as planning time will be spent trying to gain a better understanding of the items on the product backlog.

Failing to establish a specific sprint goal is also a common downfall of sprint planning, which results in the team working on unrelated items. As a result, the team perform a full sprint without making a lot of progress.

When should sprint planning be used?

Sprint planning should be used if the sprint framework is being used, or if the chosen methodology involves time boxed iterations. Following a similar event is also useful for teams following a more flow-based methodology to create a shared understanding of queued items.

Sprint planning is a staple of the scrum methodology, allowing the whole project team to understand the sprint goal, which items from the product backlog list will be delivered, and how they will deliver them.
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Divided into two parts, sprint planning can be useful across methodologies, but only if a refined product backlog exists.

Originally posted on PM Majik.

Your business card is your calling card. It should be a tool that will get people to remember you and contact you for business. But if your business card is poorly designed, has important contact information in unreadable fonts, or looks unprofessional it will be useless. Be sure your card works hard for you by avoiding these 12 common business card mistakes.

A business card is one of the most important and cost-effective marketing tools a business has. It helps people remember you after they return from a meeting, and it gives them a way to contact you in the future. Scanning applications for smart phones let your customers scan your card and transfer your contact information to their phone, too. Yet too often, small businesses make mistakes on their business cards that prevent the card from making a great impression. For instance, there's a good chance that if the look and quality of your card is shoddy or unprofessional, it may be thrown into the trash...

Is your organization at that point where you are looking for more control over your expanding project portfolio? Are you looking for a full featured project portfolio management (PPM) solution because your organization and project portfolio have both grown and you now are seeking to take the next big step in the process? Do you have budget in place? How big is your project portfolio now? What are you expecting as annual project growth? Project revenue growth? Project resource growth? Overall PM infrastructure change and growth?

All these things are considerations on whether a project portfolio management tool is necessary for your organization. If your project portfolio is more than 10 projects and over $1 million, you likely need a PPM tool. There are several things you'll want to consider along with that. Are you traditional waterfall or agile in your project management and software development environment. If you're both, consider a hybrid PPM solution that works well for both. Your project successes are too vital to almost any size organization so be sure to cover all areas. But how standard can you go or how progressive and scalable should you go?

How Standard Can You Go?

So the next thing to decide is how far do you go with PPM? Can you go with a standard PPM solution or do you need one that can be highly customized to meet your current needs as well as likely future project growth needs.

A few ways in which the portfolio management process helps support the fundamentals of project management:

• Avoids project management disasters by pointing out good projects versus bad projects, the ROI and the projected value the project might have to the organization
• Offers a clear path to prioritization that allows project managers to create flexible timetables
• Lists what team members and project managers are available
• Helps assign monetary value to a project, making project budgets firm
• Integrates easily with other key PM related tools. Bidirectional Jira integration and others may be a consideration.
• Integrated resource management to help keep resource allocation in check across all projects

Project portfolio management sets out a methodology used to predict potential problems, review progress towards operational goals, manage budgets, and address stakeholder concerns, allowing project managers to then follow up with precision execution.

The Right High Level View

Project portfolio management gives companies a bird’s eye view of upcoming, current and past projects. By seeing the big picture of how a proposed project will fit into the goals and objectives of the organization, companies can make better decisions on what projects to choose and what initiatives will create the most return.

Given that most complex organizations need this type of solution and these various features and are also experiencing growth to some degree and and some relative pace, it is likely that most would benefit from a more customizable PPM solution. Is that you? Likely.

Enterprise portfolio tools decrease the reliance on multiple applications that can increase overhead and confuse workflows. Because project portfolio management is inherently complex due to how much is being managed at once, it's important to select an enterprise project management tool that is simple and easy to use for everyone in the organization – not just the early adopters. And one that is customizable for the company's specific project and resource related needs. Be sure to look for tools that minimize overhead, manual effort, and excessive documentation, opting instead for a tool that features intuitive design, simple functionality, and a mobile application that allows everyone in your organization to access the tool, wherever they are.

Summary / call for input

The right enterprise PPM solution can help move your organization forward in terms of PM successes, resource management and customer responsiveness and retention. Making the right decision can be critical – understand your organizational needs well before researching and selection.

What about our readers – what are your thoughts and experiences with your own PPM needs and choices? Please share and discuss.

An organization's need for a project portfolio management (PPM) tool is usually dependent on the their size, client base, types of projects they undertake and sizes of projects they are engaging on over the course of time. Ideally, any PPM could serve the organization and provide for all the real world needs it requires of the portfolio management tool in order to best align project executions with the goals and missions – however evolving they may be – of the organization for best project performance, prioritization and delivery?

With that in mind, let's consider the big picture wish list – what a PPM should be. Below I've listed five of those concepts and why most PPM offers fail to deliver what an organization really needs from a PPM solution in order to truly be effective...
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• Ability to breakdown business strategies. A solid PPM requires that you be able to break any business strategy down into multiple portfolios and organizations. Flexibility and user-friendliness are key and most offerings fail miserably in this area. These two concepts should be at the forefront of a PPMs software design and that's where most fall short. A solid PPM should also be able to work well with existing tools in the organization – for example be able to support bidirectional Jira integration. Many cannot so consider that before purchasing.