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Showing posts with the label milestones

The Sketches : First draft completed! Hurrah!

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That's a big step forward ticking off that milestone.  Had to make a couple of decisions to bite the bullet and remove some items and keep them for a later date, killing my darlings.  Stopped myself including some last minute bright ideas too, though one or two got through. Now there is just the little task of editing, formatting for the ebook, formatting for the printed edition, cover design for the ebook, cover design for printed, deciding on the pricing, advertising, proofing the copies, wider distribution strategy.............Not much then. In other news I pushed out a survey request about what project management tools are overrated and underrated.  Take a look here an give me your thoughts. All the best, Nigel The Sunday Lunch PM Check out my Amazon  Author Page You can sign up to one of the first to read my next book, Project Management: The Sketches  here . Click here to enable the Alexa Skills -  Scrum Guide Facts  or  The Sunday Project Status U

Happy New Year

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Partway through the year I set my self the goal of delivering my next book by the end of 2017, the really observant of you will have spotted that I did not meet this goal.  This was a result of a number of things (excuses), including being diverted by new technology including podcasting with Anchor.fm and creating Alexa Skills, but also not being entirely happy with what I have produced for the book so far. As with all projects when a milestone is missed we have to replan and I now have reset this goal to be by the end of June with a stretch target of the end of March.   I can only apologise to those of you who have cleared their diary to make sure you had time to read the new book. Wishing you all a happy and prosperous New Year.  May all your milestones be on time,  May all your RAG statuses be green  and May none of your risks become issues. All the best Nigel Creaser The Sunday Lunch PM Check out my Amazon  Author Page When I Were a Project Manager is s

Project Managers - What do you do all day?

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How often do you get a question like that from a friend or a family member, "What is it you do again?" or " What do you do when you go to work daddy?".  If you say "I am a project manager" these days it will fill their heads with visions of The Apprentice TV Show candidates shouting "I am the PM do as I say!", or a man in a hard hat talking to Kevin McCloud on Grand Designs about something is late. I do not have a solution to this dilemma and there are probably a hundred blog posts talks about how to talk to people about being a Project Manager. A quick google for " explaining what a project manager does" presents details of roles and responsibilities not what happens. What I have got is something, whilst dramatised is a little insight into a possible day of a project manager. Last night I watch the film called Locke starring Tom Hardy, now I don't want to give away the plot as you may want to watch it, and I do recommend watch

Project Management and the Doctors waiting room

I am sat in the doctors waiting room and the doctor is running an hour late. That now puts me an hour late. Somehow I will have to either catch up the time or write it off and hope the some form of karma will give me an hour back sometime in the future. It makes me think that this is how we can end up having project problems, someone slips on a dependency for you or the resource is not available to start on time. On the face of it what's an hour? Either the resource will pick up the slipped hour or we can do a bit of overtime later if needed. Then later arrives, the person doing the work did not catch up the hour they did the job is 32 hours as estimated, 20 other minor slips happen and you are now 200 hours down and it's Friday and just a weekend before go live, you only have 3 people available to help. How the hell did I get in this mess, nothing major has happenned. Does this sound familiar? Maybe a bit extreme? As a PM it makes me think we all need to be mindful of thes