WEBINAR: Coping with Multitasking During Project Meetings (9/17)
During your project meetings, are the participants
reading email, surfing the web, or doing instant messaging
while they “half-listen” to the meeting?
Research shows that 90% of people participating in virtual meetings are “multitasking”: doing at least one other thing that is not related to the meeting.
Wouldn’t it be better for your project outcome if team members and stakeholders paid full attention for the whole meeting?
You may be surprised at the answer.
This entertaining and information-packed talk examines the challenge of multitasking and teaches coping skills, techniques, and tools to manage the attention of meeting participants.
Created and delivered by a master presenter who is a veteran of both project management and executive management, this course shows you how to manage participants’ attention, get your issues resolved, and adjourn the meeting with time to spare.
After this presentation, you will be able to:
- Take a rational, systematic approach to managing attention
- Get more done in less time
- Apply techniques that reduce everyone’s frustration level
Why attend?
- You sense that meeting participants are not paying enough attention.
- You have trouble getting informed decisions from busy stakeholders.
- Your meetings run too long and still do not achieve their goals.
- You experience mounting frustration about multitasking
Presenter: Jim Black (LinkedIn profile), PhD
WEBINAR – What Is Your Teamability? Understanding the Natural Roles Your Team Members Best Fill with a Role Based Approach
July 11th and 18th, 2012 (11-2pm Los Angeles / 7-9pm GMT)
Do you want great team players on your team?
- Would you like to learn who can make or break your project?
- Are you interested in reducing the risk of a failed hire?
There are many ways to measure skills, talents, and traits, but teaming metrics are unique. It took 25 years of research and testing – including 9 years of software development – to produce TGI Teamability™ reports, which are the foundation of TGI’s Role-Based Approach to selecting, structuring, managing and motivating teams.
Organizations of every type and size experience the cost and pain of human performance failings, and are highly vulnerable to the ‘collateral damage’ that results from hiring the wrong people. TGI Teamability™ makes it possible to reliably select high quality team players, and to match their job responsibilities to the way they envision themselves serving their team (their ‘Role’).
TGI Teamability was designed from its very beginnings to measure and predict the quality of a person’s team interaction. It can greatly reduce the costs and risks associated with errors in hiring and promoting, while delivering significant business value by matching people to the functional mission of their team. It is also highly effective in analyzing and solving team performance problems.
This course is a comprehensive overview of Teamability and CHI methods. It prepares learners to provide basic support to users of TGI Teamability™, and to apply for an optional Certification. Certification requires passing a written examination and meeting TGI’s modest standards for ongoing participation.
Course content includes:
• Participant’s own TGI Teamability report ($80 value!)
• 4 PDU’s / CDU’s “category C”
• Readings to be completed during course attendance
• Brief written examination to measure comprehension of course
materials and to receive certificate (optional!)
PDUs: 4
COST: Free
Speaker: The Gabriel Institute has created technology that reveals how people will perform when working with others to solve problems, overcome obstacles, and achieve common goals. In short, it measures Teamability: the ability to connect with others to form a productive team.
** NOTE: This registration is for 2 consecutive Wednesdays.
LIVE COACHING RECORDING – Accountability: Creating Winning Teams !
Back by popular demand…Join us at this 1 hour live coaching session where Birgit Zacher Hanson, author of Who Will Do What by When? will reveal how to change the accountability game and make it winnable. Birgit will also answer questions in real-time while coach participants on real-life-issues that relates to getting others to commit and follow-through.
Birgit helps corporations with the following – she can help you too !
- Strengthen leadership capabilities and help leaders develop coaching skills that lead to sustainable excellence
- Build collaborative teams and work cultures that enable superior project execution in alignment with business strategy
- Empower individuals to fulfill on their potential and reach new levels of success
Can you make people do anything they don’t want to do?
Holding others accountable is a myth. It’s like Sisyphus being condemned to pushing the rock up the hill… It’s exhausting. If you are a manager whose job it is to get a team to work together and get the job done, this may be bad news. I am sorry.
I know it can be extremely frustrating when nothing you say or do seems to make a sustainable difference with some people.
You can micromanage, push, scold, even threaten certain people and get what you need for a little while, but as soon as you turn them loose, the rock rolls downhill again. And you start over, doing the same thing you have been doing – pushing, scolding, complaining like a broken record.
A Process for Managing Risks in Distributed Teams
Distributed teams have become more and more common in today’s global market. Especially with the mass amount of off-shoring and outsourcing going on at companies in their effort to save money. But with disstributed and virtual teams come challenges that project teams need to plan for and manage risk around.
Yes, distributed teams add risk to projects – so check out this article that illustrates the nontrivial skills & insight to practice risk management. It does a comprehensive job of
- Identifing inherent risks in distributed teams,
- Sharing techniques to solve them, and
- Providing Guidelines for applying the techniques.
Eight Risk areas are covered:
* task distribution,
* knowledge management,
* geographical distribution,
* collaboration structure,
* cultural distribution,
* stakeholder relations,
* communication infrastructure, and
* technology setup.
NEW WEBINAR RECORDING – 5 Key Benefits Agile brings to Distributed Development
Agile teams considering an outsourced development partner with deep experience in Distributed Agile Project risk increases when collaboration among team members is compromised. But by knowing as much as possible about the health of a project in real-time, teams are better able to adapt to a plan and lessen risk as it comes. How can this happen? Studies have proven that the discipline that Agile development practices bring can lead to true Risk Management.
Join Rally Agile Fellow, Jean Tabaka, and Wipro’s expert consultants to learn how Agile resolves many of the classic challenges of distributed development and how your teams will:
- Scale without sacrificing quality
- Ensure expected productivity increases
- Gain feedback through incremental value delivery
- Accept change without slowing down
- Reduce project risk through greater visibility
Don’t miss this opportunity to make your distributed development projects as successful as possible.
WHO SHOULD LISTEN: 
IT development managers and executives wanting more productivity and less risk in their outsourced development projects.
..
SUCCESS STORY Audio – Mixing Scrum and Waterfall
Hear about a real world project — Very Large, Complex, Multi-year and Distributed at a market leading financial corporation — where Agile practices were introduced in a very Waterfall traditional environment.
A seasoned PM Consultant, Donnla Nic Gearailt, shares her experience as the Project Manager of a team with responsibilities for the development of NEW software for businesses globally, ranging from tactical bug fixes, to complete system rewrites and re-engineering, to adding new modules to existing systems.
She shares with us in a 30 minute interview:
- How Waterfall and Scrum fit into her project lifecycle
- What happened before Scrum Sprints started
- How Estimating was done with the team and ultimately got management approval
- What the Team looked like and roles on the team (ie. Project Manager, Product Owner, Stakeholders Business Users, Development, Testing and Release)
- How her mixed project was integrated with the other waterfall-only projects
- How dependencies between projects were handled
- How the Backlog was managed and what was in the backlog
- What the Scrum Sprints looked like – duration – activities – stand-ups
- What documentation was used ?
- How Collaboration was encouraged and achieved with such a distributed team.
- LOOKING BACK – Donnla also shares what made the project a great success, and key factors any company should consider in mixing Agile & Waterfall when starting to use Agile in their Waterfall world.
SPEAKER: Donnala Nic Gearailt is a Project Management Consultant with CROM Consulting Ltd. She has been leading and participating in Agile teams for over 4 years and over 8 years in Financial Projects. She has also played the role of Portfolio Manager, Business Analyst and Developer — and now is the Project Manager of teams. She has extensive experience in managing projects with many dependencies on other teams and in dealing with the associated issues, such as getting her projects on to the relevant prioritization lists and executed.
To listen to the recording, just fill out the small form below. You will then be taken to the recording immediately to listen to at your leisure!
As an added benefit we will also add you to the 1000′s of subscribers that receive our Agilista PM Newsletter email that goes out every few weeks. You can unsubscribe at any time.
..
WEBINAR – Applying Agile to Multi-Team Projects
Managing software projects when just one team is involved is tricky enough. After all, apply Agile concepts to large programs or portfolios and the many challenges reveal themselves.
This presentation takes examples of experiences with clients around the world to shed light on best practices as well as avoidable pitfalls when applying Agile to multi-team development projects. A webinar from Thoughworks.
.
WEBINAR – Tools for Distributed Agile Meetings (2 Part Series)
Communication breakdown between remote locations will wreak havoc on a project. As team members struggle to effectively communicate, dysfunctional attitudes and inefficient practices endanger the team’s ability to deliver. Communication over multiple time zones, thousands of miles, and different cultures is not easy. As a result, d elivery risks on distributed projects will always increase.
“Can you hear me now? Good . . .” is a two-part webinar series put on by ThoughtWorks designed to address those concerns and risks. The goal of this series is to provide immediate support and detailed suggestions to project teams struggling to work in this distributed environment.
Part 1: Tools for Distributed Agile Meetings
In Part 1 of this series will review and rate the best of breed tools that are available in the market to address the key communication challenges faced with distributed development. We will evaluate a variety of tools and what they do for your project, including: Instant Messenger/Chat Tools, Desktop Sharing, VOIP, Web Conferencing, Wiki/Collaboration Tools, Issue/Task Tracking Tools, and Application Lifecycle Management. View Webinar here
Part 2: Facilitating Distributed Agile Meetings
Part 2 of builds on the tool recommendations from Part 1 to focus on process and innovations used by effective project teams to facilitate four typical Agile meetings between remote locations: Distributed Release Planning Sessions, Distributed Iteration Planning Meetings, Distributed Stand Ups, and Distributed Retrospectives. View Webinar here
Mark Rickmeier has over 9 years’ experience in the IT industry. As a project manager for many years, Mark specialized in Agile transformation and project governance with a focus on metrics and measurement. He has extensive distributed development experience working with project teams in Australia, India, China, Canada, the UK, and the US. His industry background includes equipment leasing, retail, insurance, healthcare and retail banking. He is currently a Client Principal at ThoughtWorks..
WEBINAR – Globally Distributed Agile
Learn about choosing Agile practices for your software development project. And learn what happens when the offshore value proposition comes along with the fact that the delivery team is spread over several locations. This webinar is by Thoughworks.
Webinar Recording can be listened to click here
.
2010 Trends in Project Management
2010 brings with it multiple trends for Project Management. It is not surprising that many of these trends will help mature the world of project management as we know it today. Just as businesses must be flexible with market conditions – Project Management professionals and organizations must also adapt accordingly.
In talking to industry leaders in Project Management – several trends stand out.
Economic conditions have changed – Companies are changing – and project managers must understand these changes to be the leaders needed in 2010.
Trend 1 – Enterprises continue to look for Efficiencies in Process & Technology
Let’s Connect!
My Speaking Engagements …..
-Feb 28: PMI Agile CoP: Agile Estimation 102
-Apr 18: TOYOTA HQ: Start Using Agile|Lean in your Projects Today
-Nov 10: HOW TO PLAN, MANAGE, and TRACK ITERATIONS (ProjectTimes)
-Dec 16: DEALING WITH THE TOP 10 ISSUES DURING & AFTER AN ITERATION (ProjectTimes)
-Jan 13: AGILE REQUIREMENT GATHERING & DOCUMENTATION - BEYOND USER STORIES (ProjectTimes)
-Feb 10: DEALING WITH THE TOP 10 ISSUES IN AGILE ADOPTION (ProjectTimes)
Some Agile User-Groups and Links…
