The Sunday Lunch Project

Today Project Management: The Sketches became available on  Google Play Books , get your copy here. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=CNV1DwAAQBAJ All the best, Nigel The Sunday Lunch PM Check out my Amazon  Author Page Click here to enable the Alexa Skills -  Scrum Guide Facts  or  The Sunday Project Status Update T o consume the podcast click here  https://anchor.fm/s/191c9d0/podcast/rss/

Today Project Management: The Sketches became available on  Apple Books , get your copy here. https://itunes.apple.com/book/id1440708318?at=11l9mv  All the best, Nigel The Sunday Lunch PM Check out my Amazon  Author Page Click here to enable the Alexa Skills -  Scrum Guide Facts  or  The Sunday Project Status Update T o consume the podcast click here  https://anchor.fm/s/191c9d0/podcast/rss/

The podcasts below is essential listening for all project managers who want a long and successful career. Having a longterm blame management toolset is not taught in a lot of places but is something we all need to put in place. Please take a listen, you will not regret it. Special: https://t.co/30DuViNLSF Episode 4 - Project Blame Management https://t.co/L8EtDr7Srt — The Sunday Lunch PM (@SundayLunchPM) April 1, 2018 Blame Management, essential PM skill. Anyone Fired Lately by Scott Adams https://t.co/l94EDIZrPQ via @Dilbert_Daily — The Sunday Lunch PM (@SundayLunchPM) April 1, 2018

I just checked and realised that I have not written on the blog for the whole of Feb.  Apologies for that, I imagine the anticipation of the next words to be uttered by me has been almost unbearable for you all. "So what the heck have you been doing Creaser?" I hear you cry.   You will be surprised to hear I have not been distracted by sorting through and indexing all the valentine cards I received. Or digging myself out of snow drifts.  I have actually been prioritising, wait for it! Wait for it! Yes, WRITING!. I have made some good progress into Project Management: The Sketches,  most of the raw content is now complete and I am now editing and revising. I have also been poking at the cover design, will be putting some mockups to get your opinion on what looks best to you. In other news, at the end of January, I reverted When I Were a Project Manager back to 99p rather than free and in the background been working on the paperback version which is allowing me to learn

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

I have done all of these in one form or another. Not proud but understand why I have done.How many have you done. How to Be the Worst Project Manager on the Planet: 11 Habits to Stop Now!

Here's the logic,  We all get too many emails! We all send too many emails! We all speak of email as we do about traffic when we are stuck in it! What do I mean? Well when we are in a traffic jam we refer to the traffic being bad as if we are not part of it , but actually we are part of that collective term of traffic, if we were not there ourselves there would be less traffic.  The same can be said for email, if we sent one less email there would be less "traffic" for the recipient. So what's the suggestion? If every email we receive, that we need to reply on, we look at the recipients and the people copied on it and assess whether they need to be copied on our reply. Sometimes people are included by the originator to show that they are doing something, so once copied the goal is accomplished and the copied recipient does not need to see the rest of the conversation because they know the conversation is going on. There is a feeling sometimes that we h

I have created a new page on the blog which will list resources for all project managers, be they new to it or experienced. The links are to things that I have benefited from and hope you do too.  If by doing so I help one PM find something that will make the next stakeholder meeting a little less tense or the words for the next project update simpler then I am happy. I will add to this list over time but if you have a recommendation just add a comment to this post or drop me a mail. Here is the link http://thesundaylunchproject.blogspot.com/p/other-project-management-sitesblogs.html All the best and I hope you find it useful.

Well it comes to that time of the year where every blogger starts to use analogies from Christmas and the New Year to make their point.  Some use it as an illustration of a point, others as a pun, on principle I am not going to do that, just to be controversial. That said I cannot really criticise the story telling nature of communication, that is fundamentally the basis for my book. (Yes it does exist, it is coming, I am working on it. Honest!!!).  So why did I choose this way to get my point across?  1. To keep me interested My natural tendency is to gravitate to the new and interesting things in life and once I get a general view I can loose interest and motivation. 2. To keep the reader interested Some subjects, no matter how interested you are in them, when you get down to the gritty details are not very enthralling, this may result in erratic behaviour like preferring to do the washing up or take our the trash. 3. To tie in some emotion I believe that we all learn thin

I had a long day yesterday and little access to my email, so while watching Jamie does...... I checked my mail and I found a number of emails which were marked as important so naturally had a look at those first.  To my surprise one of the mails was a list of training courses available for the coming month and my first reaction was "Why has this person marked this as important, it's not important to me." and following on from this I have been thinking about relative importance of emails. I do not, as a matter of course, use the important button unless I am sending something to my team that I want them look at quickly.  As I do not do it often the impact appears to be OK because they check the mails I send them pretty quickly anyway but this extra emphasis gets the results. When sending an email to someone who is not in my team I very, very, rarely use the important button because important is a subjective assessment.  Things that I consider important in my role may be

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

Now I have not done a lot so far, but ideas continue to flow and my notes are increasing. I have found that alternative ideas spring to mind and have gone back to a couple of my other book ideas and done some work on those. So I am thinking that the only I can get myself going is to set my self some task related goals and rewards. So number 1 is that I will write in my blog at least once per week, be it about the book or about project management in general. So this week I thought I would share a couple of sites which you may find of interest if you are interested in project management. Firstly an author in the UK who launched his book last year and has been getting good reviews and seems to be on every PM related podcast around the world. Peter Taylor has published the book the Lazy Project Manager which takes a slightly different approach to thinking about the priorities of managing projects you can find out more at www.thelazyprojectmanager.com Secondly the podcast where I first

So I thought I would share how this idea came about and it evolved. I had been thinking of article ideas to help me practice for writing my other book and to get some feedback on my style. To get some additional benefit I thought I would target the content at project management which, if published, would allow me to claim it as a continued professional development activity and assist in keeping my PMI qualification (more information can be found here http://www.pmi.org.uk/ ) So while on a caravan holiday in a lovely South Wales site in Wiseman's Bridge I started putting down my ideas using a mindmap, and thought I would have the makings of a reasonable article. The thing was as I sat there with a bunch of coloured pencils and a pad the ideas start to run and the gallop and in front of me was more than enough material for an article and then I thouught could this be a book. Since then I had not done anything much with it or my other books until I read Peter Taylors book thelazypr