Category – Project Management
41 posts tagged with "Project Management" (See all categories)

SSlightly Smiling Face

11/15/20181 Min Read — In Office, Project Management

A recent Slack exchange in a Project Mangement group. I hang out in too many Slack channels. Why are people like this? Please call out bullshit when you see it. Christine Nov 14th at 5:14 AM Hi…

PPM Template: RACI

07/18/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. This is a very high level RACI sheet to log the basics of who's on point for what. They can get much more complicated but it's good at…

PPM Template: Project Brief

06/21/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This A project brief can be a useful guidepost when planning and collaborating on a project. Whether you need a brief or not is up to you. These tend to be more important for projects…

PPM Template: PMO RACI

05/07/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This Why does your PM need it's own RACI? Because our work can be invisible when done well. Your work deserves to be accounted for in the project and without this level of breakdown, your…

PPM Template: Decision Log

04/28/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This A decision log serves a few purposes. Where I find it to be most valuable is as a gift to your future self or perhaps other project spelunkers. Over the course of a project there…

PPM Template: WCAG Audit

03/28/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This You should pay a professional to do accessibility auditing, especially if they are a member of a marginalized group due to aspects of their abilities. But we can't always unlock that…

PPM Template: Budget

03/10/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This These templates were made in an agency context and might make zero sense for your use case. They are skeletons and do not have fancy calculations everywhere. But! They may prove…

GGreat Episode for PMs

03/07/20181 Min Read — In Project Management

If you think a lot about the planning fallacy and question your optimism bias this Freakonomics podcast episode is perfect for you, and any project manager really. Featuring a PM from Asana…

UUse Slack Reminders To Keep On Track

02/22/20181 Min Read — In Office, Project Management

Slack has a very simple yet powerful feature called Reminders. The syntax takes a little getting used to.   I've found them to be a low stress, high impact. Here's a few ways we've made them work for…

PPM Template: Scope Log

02/14/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This Of course you defined scope already. And of course you called out what's definitely not in scope. But that's just not how software works. Especially in an agency context. Your scope…

IIron Triangle or Iron Cross

02/02/20181 Min Read — In Project Management

You've heard of the iron triangle of project management: Budget/Cost, Timeline/Schedule, Scope/Features. Sometimes you will see this with Quality shoved into the middle. Other sources have quality as…

PPM Template: Meeting Cadence

01/20/20181 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This You need a meetings and communication plan with a known and predictable schedule. These moments are the heartbeat of the project. The plan will also help onboard new team members. If…

PPM Template: Estimates

12/14/20171 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This Your project estimates will need to be defensible both internally and externally. In your project planning you should have these phases mapped out with at least a back-of-the…

LLet Go and Let Jira

10/19/20171 Min Read — In Project Management

After years of deftly avoiding it and begrudgingly tolerating it when unavoidable, I'm now implementing it. This is how mind-blowingly awful the out of box experience is with Mingle. Apparently Mingle…

PPM Template: Charter

10/01/20171 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This A charter can be one of the most useful tools in a project managers toolbox. The scope, vision and clarity this document provides should last the entire project through and should…

110 Percent

08/27/20171 Min Read — In Project Management

Ten percent doesn't sound very big. Sometimes as a tester we can only make so much of a dent. Can we test the product and coach our team towards quality so that the app responds 10% faster? Can we…

OOn Meetings

08/25/20171 Min Read — In Office, Project Management

A rule to live by is: never misuse time. Always communicate the meeting value to the attendees. To make the best use of meetings, please consider the following: Check your teammate's schedules before…

GGetting Your Project Charter Right

08/10/20172 Min Read — In Project Management

Beyond the project hard facts of budget, stakeholders, dates, and milestones, your project should have a high-level charter that helps align you with the client and the team with the vision. This can…

PPM Template: QA & Test Coverage

06/15/20171 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This You need a quality and testing plan for your projects. This one is just a scaffold and not heavyweight at all. It's enough to get you going but not enough to take you there. I have…

PPM Template: Post Mortem/Retro

04/15/20171 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This Your using a continuous improvement methodolgy somewhere in your process. This will naturally include moments to review and reflect on the status quo. Use these questions to help…

PPM: The Post Ship Follow Up

04/10/20171 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Begin with the end in mind, as they say. Your client services team should have a plan for what happens after the boat is in the water. You don't want to just disappear on your client. It's a…

PPM Template: Browsers

01/20/20171 Min Read — In Project Management, Resources

Why You Need This These templates are for logging your browser support for a project. Your client will either know offhand what they want and can fill it in themselves. If they really know what they…

PProject Management Traceability

04/23/20161 Min Read — In Project Management, Testing

Just like your developers and testers want to be able to debug a stacktrace, so do your project managers want to trace issues at the project level. How do we do this? How do we work in a traceable way…

DDrinking From The Firehose

09/29/20151 Min Read — In Office, Project Management, Testing

Whether you are a PM or QA, you want to have your finger on the pulse of a project. If you've got Slack, you can leverage applications and integrations to find that vein. Create a dedicated channel in…

PPM Quick Tip: Project Vitals

06/15/20151 Min Read — In Office, Project Management

We all know that Documentation is Critical and Shared passwords are too . We may not always need a multi-page wiki document but getting a quick list of project vitals and pinning them in a Post in…