Business Goal Setting & Tracking: A Guide

Goal setting is a great way to focus your staff or team on the direction and destination of your organization’s short, medium and long-term journeys. Having clear goals and pathways for them to be achieved will help your organization to grow, give a clear reference point for all team members and help to harness the...

IT Project Managers: How to Adapt and Thrive in the DevOps Era

The rise of DevOps has unleashed a range of technical, workforce and business benefits, including: more deployments, faster lead times, shorter recovery times, lower change failure rates, less unplanned and rework, and even happier people. Indeed, as noted by open source configuration tool maker Puppet, enterprises that boost performance through DevOps methodologies enjoy greater employee...

Why You Shouldn’t Skip the Closure Phase of a Project

Every project is a lesson and skipping the closure phase in the lifecycle of a project is akin to never taking the final test. Whether it is a success or failure, an organization can learn something from every venture. That is, of course, unless you fail to document the final phase or meet on deliverables....

The Top Seven Challenges of Doing Business in the UK

The UK is currently going through a surprising economic boom considering the 2016 vote to leave the world’s biggest trading bloc, the EU. Predictions of Britain’s demise were seemingly greatly exaggerated and it has in fact gone from strength to strength since the vote, with unemployment reaching its lowest level in more than 40 years....

Vendor Management vs. Project Management: What’s the Difference?

Working with vendors is a very common occurrence in project management as it will be very rare that your team will have absolutely everything it needs in-house to complete their assigned tasks. Whether it’s physical materials, online storage or hosting, outsourced support lines or any number of other external needs, vendor relationship management will play...

How to Kick Off a Project…The Right Way

While the saying “a good start is half the work” is never true when it comes to almost any project, it does still play a very significant role in the momentum that the project begins with. For a project manager therefore, knowing how to kick off a project effectively is an important and necessary skill...

How to Use Rewards and Recognition to Motivate Your Team

While it would be great if everyone was able to maintain the same, 100%, level of performance consistently, unfortunately it never happens. One of the biggest reasons for this can come down to motivation and one of the key influences on motivation are the rewards and recognition someone receives for the work they do. While...

Identifying Project Stakeholders (When They Aren’t Obvious)

  Every project has stakeholders and identifying their role and importance for your project can be key for ensuring swift decision making and the ability to recognize which needs take priority over others. If you are wondering how to identify project stakeholders, they can generally be defined as: A stakeholder is any individual, group, or...

What Are the Qualities of a Strong Manager?

The qualities of a strong manager are many yet can be distilled down to a few basic concepts, such as: Motivation Intuition Versatility Confidence Flexibility Organization Industry Knowledge Communication Respect Being a strong manager is not always easy, but the positive effects of being able to lead a team effectively and get the most out...

Project Schedule Overruns: How to Prevent Delays from Becoming Disasters

If you’re at the helm of a project that has fallen behind schedule, then be assured that you aren’t alone. Despite the fact that the science of project management has been around for decades and the profession is booming, most projects still fail to reach the finish line on time. In fact, a study published...