Resources

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Written by: Kim

Category: Resources

Published: 08 November 2017

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Starting from a list generated by attendees to Kim's Emotional Intelligence session at the 2017 PMI Global Conference, following is a list of interesting team building activities.

Guidelines

In general, here are some good guidelines for team building activities:

• Understand the personality of your team before you schedule a team-building event
• Movies, amusement parks, and arcades are not effective for team building (they're great for celebrations though)
• Problem-solving events (scavenger hunts, locked room, ropes courses) work well
• Be aware of peoples' physical limitations
• Think outside the box - shared experiences work as well as problem-solving events

Suggestions

• A sensory scavenger hunt, where clues use all the senses to appeal to multiple learning styles
• Cooking together
• Zip line
• Community service
• Happy hour
• Pedicures and margaritas

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Written by: Kim

Category: Resources

Published: 02 October 2016

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• Finding Time (Perlow)
• The Pomodoro Technique (Cirillo)
• Conquering Chronic Disorganization (Kolberg)

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Written by: Kim

Category: Resources

Published: 02 October 2016

Hits: 8234

Books

• Program management by Michael Thiry
• AntiPatterns in Project Management by  Brown, McCormic, and Thomas
  • This is an interesting take-off on the programming antipatterns book.  It basically outlines common project management problems and gives ways for correcting them.  The layout is a little odd if you're not a programmer but you get the hang of it pretty quickly.
  • It's helpful if you get off-course on a project, but it also helps with interviews - if the interviewer describes a problem you have a solution, or at least a familiarity with the problem
• How to Delegate (Heller)
• If You Want It Done Right, You Don't Have to Do It Yourself (Genett)
• Essential Managers Project Management (Hobbs)
• Kanban and Scrum: making the most of both (Kniberg, Skarin)

Project Management Blogs

•  Agile Project Management:  Agile is more than a method, it’s a mind set...

 Agile and Lean

• Agile & Iterative Development - A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman
  • Really good overview of Agile background, terminology, flavors
• Kanban and Scrum: Making the most of both by Kniberg & Skarin
  • This is a free download
  • Great quick overview of the two methodologies along with ways to implement them together

Dealing with the People Side

• My own - The Socially Intelligent Project Manager
• Peopleware  by DeMarco & Liste
  • Not specific to project management but very useful
• Influence: They Psychology of Persuasion by Cialdini
  • Also not specific to project management but lots of good stuff on influence management here

Podcasts

• The Digital Project Manager
• PM Podcast (Cornelius Fichtner)
• People and Projects Podcast

Websites (all the podcasts also have websites with material)

• The Girls Guide to PM
• If you're really thinking about getting into project management, it's worth the price of admission to join PMI.org.  That gets you into projectmanagement.com where there are endless articles and tons of webinars, new ones every week.

Project Management tools to learn about:

• Atlassian Series: particularly Jira and, both of which have free versions.  Confluence is an intranet product.  Jira is an agile development management tool.
• Trello (recently purchased by Atlassian), also free for one user.  Trello is for managing Kanban projects.
• Wrike: I was really impressed by Wrike when it was first announced and it's really come into its own. Wrike is a full-featured project management application with a nice, intuitive UI.  It can be used by beginners and casual users pretty easily, but also encompasses standard project management functions. With a library of templates, including a set of agile templates, a lot of the set-up work is done for you.  Integrations with Outlook and Google calendars make individual updates and reminders easy.  Lots of views are available.  Overall, Wrike is a great choice for all kinds of organizations.  
• Basecamp is used by a lot of small companies.  It's more collaboration than project management, but good to know if you're going to a small company.  There's a free version.
• Asana is also used by a lot of small companies.  It's come a long way in the last few years.  Asana is a SAAS (hosted) project management and communication tool.  It's UI is a little different than most project management tools, which means that project managers will need to search for a while to figure out how to deal with dependencies, sub-tasks, etc., but it's a bit more intuitive for those without previous project management experience.  Automatic notifications, integrations with Gsuite, and other nice communication tools make it easy to keep everyone in the loop.  Some of the graphing and reporting are also a little non-standard but all are usable.  For organizations (like schools) with many repeating/cyclic projects, there is an excellent template function that can help roll improvements back into the template without needing to research the last cycle's review notes.  Documents can be easily referenced as well.
• Free Gantt Chart software - this is a pretty current list.  I think that TeamGantt> andTom's Planner> are especially good choices.