Following a two week vacation in August, I returned to find a colleague’s message thanking me for my “amazing handover notes.” But I’ll be honest—my handover notes haven’t always received such a warm reception. Handover notes detail the essential information someone would need in order to cover your key responsibilities during a variety of situations,Read more …
As PMs, we’re negotiating constantly—even when we don’t realize it. We negotiate resources, timelines, budget, and scope every time we start a new project. The thing about negotiation is that most people don’t know how well they’ve actually done. They may leave feeling happy with the outcome, naïve to the fact that they could haveRead more …
It’s the PM/Scrum master’s dream: a high functioning, self-organizing, motivated, and fulfilled team combined with an engaged, available, and decisive product owner (aka “client”). This magic combination doesn’t come about by itself—it takes hard work, clear communication, and setting firm foundations. Do your team and product owner know what’s expected of them, what their contributionRead more …
Starting a new project can be both an exciting and daunting prospect. It might feel like you’re drowning in a sea of documentation one minute, then the next you’re encountering project drought in a wasteland of unclear deliverables and erratic input from the client. Here are some tools and activities I use across my projectsRead more …
What I love about the lean/agile methodology is how much emphasis it places on continuous improvement—it’s known for acknowledging failure, yet not letting that get in the way of moving forward or thinking ahead. While not exactly the “resolution” approach we read about each January, it’s perhaps a much more useful mindset to adopt whenRead more …
From previous experience, I know what it feels like to tell a client that we’re not going to hit their very important deadline, or that we need a further $25k to deliver the feature set we initially promised. It’s really hard; it’s easy to press send on an email bombshell at 5:30pm on a Friday,Read more …
