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Having himself worked on projects in several countries our host Cornelius Fichtner was very much looking forward to this interview with Randy Magdaluyo. Randy works for a financial services provider in the USA and was given the opportunity to work as the IT lead on a project in Europe. This project brought together a team from 3 continents. We are discussing the project itself, its cultural and communications challenges, the success factors and what Randy did to overcome his personal culture shock. As usual we also have our helpful resources that complement this interview and we give away a license to the project management methodology of our sponsor www.mpmm.com. The giveaway ends on August 27, 2007. Listen to this episode to learn how to participate.

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You will probably have noticed that communications technology seems to make the world smaller and smaller and that our project teams are suddenly all over the planet. Your sponsor is in Germany, your customer is in Chile, your engineer in Togo, two designers are in Sidney and you yourself are leading this team while sitting with your laptop on the beaches of Tahiti. What a great life we PMs have! But unfortunately, these virtual teams are quite demanding. You must deal with a multitude of cultures, several time zones and the fact that your team doesn’t have a chance to meet face to face. That is not an easy task. Adrienne Keane can help. Adrienne is a PMP® credential holder and manages virtual teams for Cisco systems. She also teaches a seminar on Effective Virtual Management at the University of California Irvine. And today you will hear her best practices.

Click here to download Adrienne's presentation (*.pdf)...

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When your project fails, your sponsor will only call one person into his office to discuss this failure... you. As the project manager you are responsible for the success and failure of your projects. And that holds true, even if the reason for this failure was outside your span of control, even if you work in a matrix environment in which project managers normally lack formal authority. Yes, we all know that responsibility and authority should be in balance, but more often than not, your responsibility outweighs the formal authority that you receive. You have to fall back to other forms of authority - referent authority, expert authority, reward authority and penalty authority. Thomas Cutting, PMP, has written a series of articles on authority in his blog at www.cuttingsedge.com [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link] and we are happy to have Thomas on the program today. We look in detail at the various types of authority, how they apply in a matrix organization and in a projectized organization and we look at what you can do to regain your authority if you think that you have lost it. As project managers, we don't think about authority often enough. It seems to be something that sort of "just happens". This discussion will give you a lot of food for thought and you will look differently at your personal authority next time that you accept a project.

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In today's episode of The Project Management Podcast™ we welcome back Dina Henry Scott, PMP, who is the host of the Controlling Chaos podcast. We discuss our successes and failures, what we like and don’t like about our projects, we discuss our PMOs and we look at the the methodologies that we use. We finish it off with with the one thing that we wish we could change in our company. Oh... and we are having a lot of fun with it, too. This is everyday, real life project management brought to you by our combined experience.

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Due to a death in the family, there will be no episode of The Project Management Podcast™ this week. We will resume our program in 2 weeks. 

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This week, The Project Management Podcast™ proudly presents to you the 100th episode of The PMO Podcast™ , which is produced by Mark Perry from BOT International. Here is what Mark writes about the episode:

The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story
This week The PMO Podcast™ Featured Story presents, "Project Portfolio Management Deployment Guidelines, an interview with Dr. Ginger Levin", presented by Mark Perry, host of The PMO Podcast™. Is your organization considering implementing project portfolio management or refreshing its approach to PPM? Dr. Ginger Levin provides deployment guidelines for PPM, insights, and ideas helpful and applicable to just about any organization seeking to manage project portfolios.

The PMO Podcast™ Points Memo
The PMO Podcast Points Memo suggests, “It's not luck." Whether a competitor in sports, a leader of a business, or a head of a PMO, success or lack there of is seldom an act of chance. It takes a lot of work and no sooner do you get things going well, than you are faced with change and the need to refine that which you have just spent quite a bit of time and effort defining in the first place.

The PMO Podcast™ Mailbag
The PMO Podcast Mailbag provides the ninth in a series of ten tips for setting up a PMO.

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Sigma is the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet and the lower case sigma (σ) is the symbol used to depict the quality management approach Six Sigma (6σ). Six Sigma is a system that was originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve manufacturing processes by eliminating defects. It was defined as a metric for measuring defects and improving quality as well as a methodology to reduce defect levels below 3.4 defects per million. Six Sigma has come a long way and is a respected methodology. Our guest today, is Steven West, who is a Six Sigma Black Belt and works for a financial services company. We explore the Six Sigma program of his company, the projects that he has worked on and learn what being a Black Belt has done for him.

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Who defines what project management is? We all do. Some of you may have a blog and you publish your thoughts on project management that way. Or you discuss a methodology with a friend over lunch. Some introduce papers with exciting new ideas to attendees at conferences or give a presentation at their professional organization's monthly meeting. Others again write articles for newsletters or magazines. Then there are those who produce podcasts or discuss project management through other media. All of us define the current and future state of project management. And then there is Jerry Manas, PMP, President and founder of The Marengo Group, LLC (http://www.manasbooks.com and http://www.pmthink.com) who like many others decided to write a project management book. And it's the process of writing a project management related book that we are going to explore with Jerry today. Being a good project manager, he has a lessons learned file that he opens up for us. We hear how he came up with the idea, how he organized it, how he found a publisher, what it takes to publicize the book and what it felt like to hold the first copy in his hands.

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This week, The Project Management Podcast proudly presents to you the latest episode of the PM Lessons Learned Podcast, which is produced by Henry Will. Here is what Henry writes about the episode:

The Conference Call from 17 Aug 2006 was on the subject of "Scope Control - Handling The Scope Creep That Plagues Us All" as presented by Steven Blais, PMP. We took a look at project scope management. Scope control covers a lot of different topics, but one of the main aims is to avoid scope creep in project management. To understand that, we have to first look at what is scope in project management, and then cover how we can best control it effectively to get the most successful outcomes for our work.

Our PM Resources:

Career Segment: The Four Steps of Career Management as presented by Rod Colon of the ETP Network.

Join our Yahoo group for details and reminders of the call and other information to help you.

PMLessonsLearned.com is all about PMs helping PMs and is open to all. Visit us at pmlessonslearned.com [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link]

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As a project manager you have to be many things. You have to be a great communicator, a leader, a visionary, and be able to both build and inspire the team, to name just a few. First and foremost, however, you have to be proactive. You employ strategies to plan the future in order to proactively minimize risk on your projects so that you can deliver on time and on budget. Why then is it that when November comes around you can hear a collective groan rise from the community of PMPs as they ask, where they could quickly get 20, 30 or even 40 or more PDUs before the year is through? Is this simply a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes? No. I think that this is an acute case of not proactively trying to understand the PMI’s re-certification requirements. As we publish this episode on The Project Management Podcast™, it is about seven months before the end of the year, and we want to help you today to understand the PMP recertification process and how you can very easily gain those PDUs before year’s end.

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Listener Alexander Maslyukov wrote in and said "In my company there are functional managers who have the power. Functional managers assign salary, bonuses and have responsibilities for promotion of the employees. PMs don't have any instruments to force stuff to do everything. The only way to make the team to do something is to persuade them. But how can we motivate people?" In response to Alexander's question we are going to delve into motivation today. We review the various motivational theories, look at how to see if motivation is a problem on your project, what you can do to motivate and energize your project team on a shoestring and we end it with James R. Chapman's very elegant Motivation Triangle. Please consult the Helpful Resources to find links to the white papers and presentations mentioned in today's episode.

Are you studying for the PMP exam? Then subscribe to The Project Management PrepCast™ at http://www.pm-prepcast.com and study by listening with your iPod.

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In Episode 062 we asked Thomas Cutting to answer the question “How can I become a Project Manager?” Today, we continue this topic with our interview Guest Josh Nankivel. In his career Josh found a love for project management and decided to go back to school and get academic training in PM. He is currently going to school and will receive his Bachelors degree in PM in about a year. After that he will continue with his studies and begin his MBA with a focus on project management. In our interview, we look at how Josh applies his academic training to his everyday work, discuss if there are differences between what he is being taught and what he actually sees in the workplace, take a look at his blog www.pmstudent.com , and want to know from him what academia and the private sector can do in order to help the PM profession grow as a whole.

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Too often in our rush to produce deliverables the communications plan is overlooked. This happens everywhere, even in companies that have formal project management methodologies. On the outset of your project you might have all the best intentions and take the time to create a communications plan. But as the project progresses and day to day issues come your way the communications plan is drifting ever more into the background. Your communications aren’t managed, new stakeholders aren’t added to the list of recipients and all that remains is a nagging feeling that you are forgetting something. That’s the story, when you use the communications plan as a tactical tool. But what if you approached it strategically? What if you took the time and really managed your communications against the plan? Might there even be benefits? Margaret Meloni answers this question with a resounding “Yes!”, which is why she is our guest today. And to help you along with your communications management plan, we have three helpful resources that help you define that plan for small, medium and larger projects. But most importantly, we announce the winners of the giveaway for two one-year subscriptions to The Project Management PrepCast™ .

Click here to read Margaret's article titled "Avoid Communications Chaos" (*.pdf)

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A Risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives. There are many hard tools out there that tell you how to identify your risks, how to quantify them, how to define their impact on the project and what you can do in order to avoid or mitigate them. But how do you and the stakeholders on your project react to risks? Do risks frighten you or do they invigorate you? And what risk approach will a frightened project manager take versus the approach that an invigorated one takes? This discussion is at the core of Risk Attitudes. We are honored to welcome Janice Preston, PMP, on our program today to explore the four basic risk attitudes. Janice was a contributor to the risk section of both the 1996, 2000 and 2004 version of the PMBOK® Guide and as such very qualified to look into this with us. As always we have Helpful Resources that complement this interview.

If you are currently studying to take the PMP® exam, then listen in and learn how you can win a free, one-year subscription to our sister podcast The Project Management PrepCast™, where you can learn the tools & techniques you need to know in order to prepare to take the PMP exam.

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"How can I become a project manager?" This is the question that we get asked most often here at The Project Management Podcast™. We tried to answer each email individually, but also decided that this would be a great topic for our program.

We looked and found Thomas Cutting (http://cuttingsedgepm.blogspot.com) who discusses this question with us today. Thomas' blog is one of many social media for project managers resources.

In the interview, we look at Thomas' own career but also take a generic look at possible PM career paths. There are many options for you to consider as a career, whether your interest is in construction, fashion, engineering, healthcare, or a particular method, like waterfall or you could take the role of project manager in SAFe agile environments and explore your interests that way.

We discuss the value of experience vs. certification and working as a PM in-house or for a consulting firm. Project manager coaching and mentoring is one way to reflect on what the right career path for you might be. If you are currently studying to take the PMP® exam, then listen in and learn how you can win a free, one-year subscription to our sister podcast The Project Management PrepCast™, where you can learn the tools & techniques you need to know in order to prepare to take the PMP exam.