Tag Archives: Project Management

Agile, Education, Project Management

New 2023 Agile / Product Management Online Courses from Pluralsight

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I’ve completed zero Scrum Education Units (SEUs) and Professional Development Units (PDUs) courses for this cycle, so I need to start ASAP. Here are some relatively new Pluralsight courses in 2023 that looked interesting to me. Some of them are a brief 1 hour, but in the aggregate, they will chip away at your needed continuing education requirements. Some of these courses are for the novice, and some more advanced. Appreciate your feedback if you’ve taken any of these courses.

Pluralsight is a great source of online courses with excellent content beyond product and project management. It covers a wide variety of business and technology courses, and the price is reasonable. At the end of the year, they have a huge discount sale on an annual subscription. You can also try the service for free.

Product Management: Understanding the Business

Released – April 30th 2023; 2h 16m

This course will give you an understanding of business concepts that will help you navigate product strategy, discovery, design, and development while supporting a growing business.

Product Management: Stakeholder Management

Released – March 22nd 2023; 1h 26m

This course will teach you how to identify product stakeholders effectively, arrange them in priority groups, and engage with them in suitable ways.

Change Management: How to Avoid the Most Common Mistakes

Released – Feb 22nd 2023; 38m

This course will teach people leaders how to avoid common mistakes and improve their change leadership skills. Attendees will learn how to recognize and address challenges such as establishing a culture of change and managing the impact of change.

Minimizing, Navigating, and Resolving Conflict During Change

Released – Feb 26th 2023; 1h 6m

This course will teach leaders how to best minimize, navigate, and resolve conflict that comes when leading a team through change.

Influencing without Authority: Becoming an Agent of Change

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 1h 7m

Influencing without authority is the ability to influence others when you do not have direct responsibility for them. This course will teach you relevant skills to help employees assert themselves to influence positive change in their workplace.

Developing Project Schedules and Budgets

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 3h 41m

Effective project leaders bring their initiatives in on time and on budget, but that starts by creating a schedule and budget in the first place. Learn the fundamentals of project budgeting and scheduling and how they relate with one another.

Serving as a Project Leader

Released – Jan 03, 2023; 2h 10m

Organizations increasingly rely on projects to generate value, while emerging methodologies question how project work gets done. This course explores how an adaptive mindset and servant approach help project leaders succeed in any environment.

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, Software Development, Technology, Work

The Power of Collective Consensus for Story Point Effort Estimations

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Blind Concurrent Flip

The bartering of effort estimations between a team of 5 or more is really cool to witness and even further awesome to negotiate the consensus process. Not quite the process of the US Congress, but still attempting those on the periphery, extreme right or left of the bell curve of outliers to move toward the consensus. Discuss and draw near the point of consensus under which individuals discover their own need for resolution under grounds of somewhat tangible to their position of an item so complex gives one hope for a grander purpose.

A synonymous flip of the cards leading to the reveal moment is humbling when a team, after several rounds of dissonance, start into a pattern yielding the voting of a collective cohesion. Why do we start voting along a mutual agreement without the need for cohesion?

Can I Convince You to..

What if Chris Wallace facilitated a Planning Poker exercise between the two presidential candidates instead of a debate, driving consensus between the two presidential hopefuls?

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, Technology, Work

When Stakeholders Collide

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Requirements Expedition

Maybe you’ll meet them during the Project Kickoff. Maybe you’ll first hear from them during a biweekly Steering Committee. Or maybe you will first hear from them three months into the project at a quarterly meeting with the CIO and the rest of his portfolio. Maybe you will never hear from them directly.

The politics of requirements gathering and prioritization is a daunting process. I’m not going to drudge up all the stories and categorize them here because it’s a painful process.

Why are some of your milestones in your project plan:

• the milestone exists within someone’s year end evaluation

• the requirements of a milestone are so bipolar, they are bound to fail. Need a project to bucket the requirements to say “we tried”, and we can pin it to a project.

• backing into established project timelines based on expectations set at the highest levels, e.g. regulatory compliance

Legal and Compliance Stakeholders

Global representation of legal and compliance requirements are a dichotomy of legal precedence between jurisdictions.

Agile Product Owner verse Waterfall Stakeholder Committee(s)

Many a project managed using waterfall kept me balancing the needs and wants of Stakeholders from all walks of life, some exuberantly voicing their opinions regardless of their position of power, or lack therein. The Agile Product Owner (PO) is a relief of burden, a single mouthpiece of the business, which dictates backlog priority.

Does Agile make the requirements gathering and prioritization pain go away? Possibly. There are various implementations of Agile, hybrid situations, and there are lots of tools out there to help manage the Product Backlog (requirements). Another exercise, developing User Journeys, working with your Personas / actors to derive their story, that is telling and lots of fun.

Education, Jobs, Work

Continuing Certification Requirements for Project Management Professional (PMP)

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The years seem to have flown by, and it’s that time again to complete my Continuing Certification Requirements for my PMP cert.

I randomly searched the web for PMP courses, then found myself back at PMI.org “Searching Activities”.  Seems like the easiest way to lookup activities because they define the activities, and the correlated list of Professional Development Units, categorized by:

  • Technical
  • Leadership
  • Strategic & Business

Based on the activities I’ve already completed, my majority of work has been accomplished in the Technical category.  I need to focus on attaining Leadership and Strategic & Business categories.

PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements
PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements

Here are a few activities I thought were interesting, and took each one of these Online or Digital Media courses.  Pluralsight provides an excellent set of courses at a relatively low price.  I highly recommend Pluralsight for your learning needs.  I also took a few of the LinkedIn courses and found it to be an excellent learning platform with a wide array of courses that can be applied as PDU credits.

Customizing Your Team Workflow with the Best of Kanban and Scrum

If you have doubts choosing which methodology to use, this course will give you a comparison of Kanban and Scrum, making your choice easier. By watching this course you will learn how to take the best of both, Scrum and Kanban, and how to make a winning combination for your team and project.

Leadership: 1.25

Crisis Communication and Technology: Communicating with Colleagues

Crisis communication is one of the most challenging communication types an organization or individual can face, bringing together emotional vulnerability, ethical challenges, and high-stakes decisions amplified by informational and persuasive goals. When managed well, this communication can neutralize and calm an evolving crisis. When managed poorly, though, crisis communication makes a situation worse. This course takes viewers through the most important parts of preparing for crisis communication, including understanding crisis types and strategies, preparing foundational documents, and how to create communication in the moment. By the end of the course, viewers will have a concrete understanding of how to manage crisis communication for their own organizations, providing invaluable insight and immediate benefit.

Leadership: 1.50

Scrum Master Fundamentals – Growing Yourself and Your Team

Are you a Scrum Master ready to advance your craft? This course will teach you specific strategies for coaching each member of your team and show you how to build on your experience as a Scrum Master to advance your own career to the next level.

Leadership: 1.25

Product Owner Fundamentals – Foundations of Product Ownership

Did you know that one of the most common reasons Scrum Teams fail is the lack of a skilled Product Owner? If you’ve suddenly found yourself in this role, this course will teach you how you can use the role to help your team deliver a great product.

Technical: 0.75   Strategic & Business: 0.50

PMI-ACP®: Value-driven Delivery and Adaptive Planning (3 of 11)

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Agile adaptive planning and value-driven delivery practices, requirements definition practices, as well as principles and practices related to stakeholder management. This course is part of the PMI-ACP Agile Project Management series.

Technical:  0.75  Strategic & Business: 1.75

Design Thinking: Lead Change in your Organization

Design thinking is a user-centered way of solving problems. It involves extensive collaboration, using strategies such as mapping customer journeys, concept creation, and prototyping. This course teaches leaders how to help their teams adopt a design thinking mindset, and provides examples from author Turi McKinley’s work at frog, a global design and strategy firm that transforms businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product, and service.

Leadership: 2.00

Organizational Change Management for the ITIL® Practitioner

Organizational change management is as essential skill for all leaders. This course will teach you how to successfully navigate the people side of change.

Leadership: 1.50

Business, Development, Technology

Project Change Management, Microsoft Solutions

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Project Facilitators, Managers, and Stakeholders, please read on…

If you’ve been charged with managing project changes, there are many Microsoft solutions that may be used by a wide array of users with varying degrees of technical experience.

  1.  Word

When the project team members are not comfortable with “technology”, MS Word may be as adventurous as you can get.

Your stakeholders believe each of your change requests have their own story to tell,  and the story should be told in MS Word.  Each of the Change Requests (CR) contain the ‘story’ of the item as well as an appended comments for each of your meetings’ notes.

The solution is a beast to manage if the product/process is used for more than a month, i.e. in an ongoing basis.  Details of the CRs can easily fall by the wayside, as well as prone to human error for the evolving descriptions and historical audit trail in the comments section.

NOTE: Free form text, excluding organizing data into Word tables.

2. Excel

MS Excel is a step up from Word, but is still susceptible to similar issues.  On the positive side, tables have the ability to be sorted, and filtered.  The content/tables may be exported into an email, MS Word doc, etc.  Both MS Word and MS Excel alone do share an additional issue, Change Requests (CR) are not version controlled at the record level.  Both Excel and Word files can be imported into a document management system, e.g. SharePoint, and the docs will have a check in/out audit.  Adding/Changing text on new/existing CRs becomes problematic, and prone to errors, and inconsistent audit of comments.

3. Project

Send them a PDF of the Project Plan.  Companies have few licenses of MS Project, and sharing a project plan with the team is most likely done by exporting the Project Plan to PDF.   When reviewing / updating the project plan in real time with the team (e.g. SMEs, Stakeholders), they collectively see the effect of adding tasks, updating duration, and dependencies.   Itemizing tasks of the team, and grouped by parent activities will help the team stay ‘on task’. The non-PMs do not need access to the Project Plan for edits; this is performed 1:1 or in a team setting with the PM facilitating.

4.  SharePoint

SharePoint is a document and workflow management system among other things.   ‘Out of the box’ capabilities enable users to track a project, Gantt charts to task management, most everything needed to manage a project, including N number of personalized views of the project data,.  The SharePoint platform, out of the box, seems to cater to the laymen as well as the technical savvy.

5. Team Foundation Server (TFS)

TFS covers the entire application lifecycle, part of which enables the team to track their backlog items.  Backlog items may be correlated to other ‘objects’, such as test cases.  All aspects of the project such as development,  builds, unit test case execution, task tracking, and backlog items reside in TFS.  For the tech laymen, i.e. business sponsor, little knowledge transfer is required for using the solution for backlog management.

6. Office Access

Yes, I’ve seen a UI on top of an Access database to manage change.  Actually, I’ve built one way over a decade ago.  It’s a lot of maintenance, just like any solution built from scratch.  With so many options out there, this would not be my first choice.

Click here for an extensive list of project management solutions.

Business, Technology

Mobile User Interface: Heat Map will Focus Users’ Attention to their Priorities

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The Windows Mobile User Interface (UI) reminds me of a project or program manager heat map report which will draw the attention of the viewer, at a high level, immediately to the most important or high priority areas of the project.  I don’t think a Heat Map is part of the Windows Mobile User Interface, but it’s an interesting concept to immediately draw attention of the smartphone user what they want to focus on, according to their preferences.

A project Heat Map is a common tool to look at complex data, and enable the user of the map to quickly, at a glance, guide their focus toward the important aspects of the data.  A mobile user interface [dashboard], at a glance, that has squares, or spaces, that expand, retract and changes colors, based on specific application user preferences can be a leap in evolution of the smartphone user interface paradigm.

At this point Android has widgets on their dashboard, and both Android and iOS have screens of icons representing applications that I must sift through to get to the specific application I would like to launch.  Widgets were an evolutionary leap allowing the user to display some of the pertinent information, as well as launch specific features of the application right from the mobile OS pages screen.

Allowing the user to designate importance to specific application properties, and then the application squares or spaces that represent the application, grow or shrink, and change colors based on user defined attributes assigned within the application for the user’s level of importance.  For example, I can provide a ‘space’ for Facebook, and if there are certain birthdays of people I am fond of, I can assign a color to the application space to change, and growth indicates amount.  It could be a hue of colors within the space. If there are Facebook user messages, that could indicate another color, and a portion of the space turns that color, and the space grows or shrinks based on the amount of messages.  The application spaces also shrink and grow relative to the total Mobile OS user interface (UI) [dashboard] page (i.e. available screen space). The space overall of the Mobile OS UI screen would have a relative importance between each of the OS applications on the Mobile OS [dashboard] page / screen prioritized by the user, e.g. The user prefers to see their Facebook messages over their importance of their twitter functionality

In addition, automatically, mobile applications should appear and disappear from the heat map dashboard where applications can be launched.  The two ways to execute a mobile application, drill down to the application through the normal hunt and peck for your app, or execute the application from the heat map in the dashboard.  The applications that you use the most will automatically appear in the dashboard, thus you don’t have to manage the applications that appear on your dashboard.

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