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Pragmatic PMO is now closed to new business

Having operated independently for over a decade, I found myself collaborating with Nicole Reilly increasingly often, to the point where we recognised that we are stronger together.

So we decided to join forces and created The PMO Professionals – an independent PMO consultancy, made up of seasoned PMO professionals, which enables us to combine our PMO expertise into one, clear offering for clients.

We look forward to servicing you at thePMOprofessionals.com

5 lessons I learned from making my #OpenToWork video series

This post uses the lessons learned process framework in my book to describe what I learned from producing my #OpenToWork video series.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you will probably know that I recently published a series of videos aimed at helping people who are looking for work in the wake of the impact that COVID19 has had on the world economy, and that I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about learning lessons from experience.

So I thought I’d walk the talk and share with you the lessons I learned from the experience of producing my #OpenToWork video series using the steps in the lessons learned process framework that I describe in my book (Experience, Reflection, Capture, Storage, Retrieval, Application) so that you can see it in action.

A framework of how organisations learn from projects
A framework of how organisations learn from projects
Continue reading “5 lessons I learned from making my #OpenToWork video series”

Project Management: It’s all bollocks! (Book Review)

Find out what we think of this short, sharp, sweary(!) introduction to very essentials of project management

Overview

  • The aim of this book is “to pick over the sadly inadequate body of knowledge that is project management today, and generally challenge just about everything, eliminating that which you don’t need to bother to learn about, or should already know, leaving you only with the parts that will give you the results you want.”
  • The book is targeted at “…those ‘projects as usual project managers’ who will drive most of the change inside organisations tomorrow and beyond, and who really need help to do that”

Continue reading “Project Management: It’s all bollocks! (Book Review)”

Managing Knowledge in Project Environments (Book Review)

This book presents knowledge management as integral to projects, and explains it using KM principles and fundamentals that apply anywhere. Hidden KM is exposed, myths are debunked and practical guidance explains how to build KM into projects and portfolios.

Overview

  • The book aims to illustrate how knowledge management (KM) contributes to successful project work. The authors present KM as an integral part of project work and explain it using KM principles and fundamentals that apply anywhere.
  • Hidden KM is exposed, myths are debunked and practical guidance explains how to build KM into projects and portfolios.
  • The aim is to help project professionals, sponsors, PMO members and others who can make a difference manage knowledge more effectively in project environments. Managing Knowledge in Project Environments offers everyone involved in project work a definitive short guide to the subject.

Continue reading “Managing Knowledge in Project Environments (Book Review)”

The Project Management Office (PMO) as a pop-up shop (Book Review)

Overview

  • This book aims to help PMO people to set up and manage a temporary PMO that effectively supports the associated project or programme.
  • The book targets anyone involved in setting up or running a temporary PMO, based on IPMA and P3O.

Continue reading “The Project Management Office (PMO) as a pop-up shop (Book Review)”

5 Lessons I learned writing a book about learning lessons

I recently published my book Learning Lessons from Projects: How it works, why it goes wrong, and how you can do it better.


My former colleague Andrew Fleming commented “Well done on the book. What lessons did you learn from writing it?”

As that’s a really good question, I thought I’d answer it properly in the form of this blog post.

So what did I learn? Here are my top five learning points. Continue reading “5 Lessons I learned writing a book about learning lessons”

Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great (Book Review)

Overview

  • The aim of the book is to introduce a structure for retrospectives and to walk the reader through planning, designing and leading a retrospective, with activities and guidance on how to use them
  • The book appears to be aimed at people who want to use retrospectives in their organizations, whether these organisations are currently using Agile techniques or not.

Continue reading “Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great (Book Review)”

Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance (Book Review)

Overview

  • This very popular book looks at the relationships between success, failure, and improvement.

  • Drawing from approaches used by aviation and sport, it suggests ways to improve how we think about our experience to learn how to do things better.
  • Unusually for a book review on this blog, this book is not aimed at project management professionals particularly, but falls more into the category of “general self help”. I reviewed it because so many of my project management professional friends told me that I should read it (including the PMO Flashmob Book Club night)!

Continue reading “Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance (Book Review)”

Stakeholder-led Project Management (Book Review)

Overview

  • The aim of this book is to provide a stakeholder-centred analysis of projects, and to explain which stakeholder identification, analysis, communication and engagement models are most relevant to different types of projects.
  • Using case studies from around the world, it illustrates what goes wrong when stakeholders are not engaged successfully, and what lessons we can learn from these examples.
  • The book is aimed at project professionals who find themselves involved in managing projects with stakeholders (so that’s just about all of them then!).

Continue reading “Stakeholder-led Project Management (Book Review)”