Social Media for Project Managers Book Study Starts May 13th

The Project Management Book Club has announced the upcoming online study of the PMI best-selling book, Social Media for Project Managers with award-winning blogger Elizabeth Harrin.

JOIN THE STUDY NOW!

Social Media for Project Managers takes a never-before-seen look at the impact and possibilities of using social media for enhancing project delivery.

It is a book for project teams that investigates the role that social media plays in helping a project manager be more effective in his or her job. The internet has given us new ways to communicate with people and organize information, and as much of project management is exactly that, this book shows project managers how they can harness this new technology to enhance their ability to work effectively with others on projects.

Social Media for Project Managers covers three reasons why project managers should become involved with social media:

• It enables the project manager to work more effectively
• It enables other people to work more effectively
• It positions the project manager as a 21st century professional in an increasingly competitive and crowded marketplace.

Readers can use this book in a practical way to improve how they deliver projects by:

• Being more effective through the use of technology
• Understanding the way other teams and individuals use technology and being able to tap into that to reduce rework, especially in the area of status reporting
• Being aware of their online presence and using this to improve career prospects.

Don’t miss this opportunity to read and discuss Social Media for Project Managers with author Elizabeth Harrin. Join the study today!

How do you SHARE your lessons learned?

We are just finishing up the online study of 'The Lazy Project Manager' through the Project Management Book Club. One of the discussion questions late in the study is about sharing lessons learned. Although the question generated some interesting responses, I didn't really come away with a clear understanding of how to do this, just theories.

Capturing lessons learned is a best practice for project management. Some do it, some don't. For those that do capture lessons learned, the primary reason for doing so is to improve--to learn from the past so you can improve in the future. And the way you improve is to reference the lessons learned during future project so that you can learn from the mistakes or challenges that previous project teams experienced. You could argue that a PMO could also use lessons learned to improve templates and processes as well.

But what good is capturing lessons learned if you do not have a good way to SHARE your lessons leanred? What good is capturing lessons learned if future project teams do not have a way to access the information?

So let's talk about it.

What does your company do to capture and share your lessons learned? When you start a new project, how do you retrieve lessons learned from previous projects. How? Do you look for internal lessons learned or external lessons learned (or both)? How do you incorporate the lessons learned from previous projects into your own projects?

A Lazy Fight

Funny story...

We are currently studying the book The Lazy Project Manager at the Project Management Book Club. I was working on writing one of the posts last night and my son stopped into my home office to talk. He noticed the book sitting on my desk and asked what it meant by 'lazy.' He asked if lazy meant that the project manager was a 'bad' project manager.

I told him that in this situation the term lazy meant smart. It meant that the project manager did things in a way that made the project much more organized and easier to manage for everyone involved. By doing this, the project manager and the team were more productive and were able to get more done with less effort.