"Transformational Project Leadership" Masterclass Series

My friend and colleague, Kevin Ciccotti, has spent the last 8+ years serving the Project Management community through his various coaching and training programs. In that time, he has established himself as an authority in helping Project and Program Managers to learn the most impactful interpersonal skills and tools to become more effective project leaders.

He is launching a first-of-its-kind 6-month “Transformational Project Leadership” Masterclass Series that is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, April 12. This is truly groundbreaking work that brings the worlds of personal transformation and project leadership together in a way that hasn’t been done before.

It’s a combination of live training coupled with follow up 1:1 private coaching for every participant. He's been working more than 2 years to create the structure and format, and this work is going to have a profound impact on how Project and Program Managers connect with and lead their project teams.

I know Kevin to be someone who delivers value in everything he does, and his mission is to help PM’s alleviate their most common challenges and sources of conflict, and to actually have more success and fun while leading their project teams. I invite you to learn more now!

ProjectManagement.com and ProjectsAtWork.com Join the PMI Family

Leading Project Management Organizations Combine to Deliver Expanded Access to Knowledge and Networking

NEWTOWN SQUARE, PA, 13 January 2014 — Project Management Institute (PMI), the world’s leading not-for-profit membership association for the project management profession today announced the acquisition of ProjectManagement.com and ProjectsAtWork.com; two of the largest online resources for project managers and professionals. For more than a decade, both websites have provided project managers with access to a broad range of tools and templates, PMO events and one of the most vibrant and diverse global online communities for professionals in project management. ProjectManagement.com was formerly Gantthead.com.

ESI International Releases Top 10 Trends in Project Management

ESI International, the world's leading project management training company, today announced the release of its top 10 trends in project management for 2014. The 2014 trends reveal that project managers are in increasingly high demand, and are being asked to lead rather than simply manage their teams. Further, the trends highlight the changing nature of project management, as organisations strive for competitive advantage.

“This year’s trends highlight the growing unease with the status quo of current project management practices,” said J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, CSM, Executive Vice President, ESI International. “Past failures to improve project efficiencies force the need to ‘pull out all of the stops’ to deal with project complexity, implement new project management approaches, and adopt alternative leadership styles to improve project success for greater competitive advantage. In-demand project managers and leaders seem ready to face the challenge.”

ESI’s top 10 trends for project management include:

Stop using Project Schedules for Resource Management

By Gary L Chefetz

The project management practice that most exemplifies Einstein’s definition of insanity is the use of project schedules as a single basis for measuring and forecasting resource demand across a shared resource pool. While a resource-loaded project schedule can produce interesting and useful data, in reality this data source is highly suspect much of the time. It is time to declare project schedules a perspective in forecasting resource capacity and demand rather than a focal point.

With the perspicuity that more than a decade of watching other people manage projects brings, I can say with strong certainty that most project managers are not very good schedulers, at least not skillful enough to produce the network integrity necessary for a detailed resource-loaded schedule to produce highly reliable predictive work load data. Note that I exclude big projects with dedicated resources, schedulers, and planners. With a team of specialists at hand, supporting your scheduling efforts, you can get great data; but achieving this level of precision is out of reach for the mainstream project manager working in a typical IT department. Not only is it an unrealistic expectation, it is an unnecessary burden.