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I am once again joined by Todd Williams, author of the book Rescue the Problem Project: A Complete Guide to Identifying, Preventing, and Recovering from Project Failure. 

In our last interview Todd gave us an overview over the process, tools & techniques he recommends for rescuing problem projects. As our next step, we want to hear from Todd how he ensures that projects don’t get into trouble in the first place.

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There is an old PM saying that goes like this: Projects don’t fail at the end... they fail at the beginning. But when exactly is “the beginning”? Is it scope definition? The kick off meeting? The creation of the charter?

For Jamal Moustafaev, PMP (www.thinktankconsulting.ca) it is even earlier than that. A project starts at project selection, which is why he wrote a book about it called Delivering Exceptional Project Results: A Practical Guide to Project Selection, Scoping, Estimation and Management. In today’s interview we are going to take a look at project portfolio management and how it helps companies to deliver these exceptional results.

Here is what Jamal wrote about his book on Amazon:

I hope that, after reading this book, junior project managers and technical team members will feel compelled to share it with their superiors so that these superiors can learn how to select projects properly and gain an understanding of the daily challenges faced by project managers. It is also hoped that senior managers who read this book will realize that there are still some improvements to be made to their project management practices and will pass this book on to their colleagues.

Portfolio management can be considered part of strategic and business management, and you may recognize that term from the PMI® Talent Triangle. We're always looking for ways to help you earn 60 PDUs towards your recertification requirements, so I hope you enjoy the episode. There are plenty more PMP PDU Podcast episodes available to you, so you can always have something to listen to as you go about your day.

As always, when we have an author on the program to discuss his or her book, we are giving away two copies. One copy automatically goes to one lucky premium subscriber and the other one is up for grabs. Please stop by at facebook.com/pmpodcast and look for the book giveaway notice. EDIT: Please note that the giveaway is now closed.

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Even though our industry has quite a bad track record of failed projects, that doesn’t mean that we need to stick our head in the sand. Joel Fleiss (www.eppora.com) is one of those thinkers who looks at the problem and tackles it head on.

In part one of the interview we looked at 7 areas of project portfolio failure and right now you are going to hear about 4 more: We start out with a recap of part 1 (just in case you’ve already forgotten what we talked about) and then we will see how Cost Estimations. Workflow and Warnings, Staff Productivity and Labor Resource Allocation can lead to project failure and what can be done about it.

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Many of you will remember Joel Fleiss (www.eppora.com) from our past interviews with the PMI LA Book Club. We heard him review one of Patric Lencioni’s books. But Joel is more than just a book reviewer, he is a senior project manager and project management consultant in his own right.

He has worked in our industry for several decades, both as a project manager and in development of project management software and he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly projects. And it’s the ugly projects that fascinated him most as he was wondering: Why do we have such a bad track record in successful projects and what can we do about it?

The answer to this question can (and does) fill several books, so it’s not surprising, that we had to cut his interview and his answer up and deliver it to you as a two-part series.

In part 1 of our look at portfolio failure, Joel and I are going to look at  a Definition of Project Failure, Project Methodology Evolution, Goals and Tactics, Project Selection, Requirements management, Schedules and Testing. Joel will explore what the problems are and what he recommends can be done about it.

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The first Thursday of November is just around the corner, which means that another year has gone by and we are heading for another International Project Management Day (http://www.internationalpmday.org). Frank Saladis, PMP, is the founder of this day and we’ve had him on the program once or twice in the past talking about the event.

So I figured that inviting him back and only talk about the IPM Day would be rather boring for everyone. However, Frank is also an accomplished and very experienced senior project manager. So I decided to tap into his vast knowledge of our profession and dig deeper.

In the interview, Frank and I begin with a quick review of the international PM day, but then we immediately move on to other PM Topics. We look at how the project management profession is regarded by the general public, what we as PMs can do to help those around us understand what exactly it is that we do and then Frank takes the pulse of the industry. He looks back to see where we are coming from, gives us his view of the current state of project management and then we glimpse into the future to see where he thinks that we are headed.

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In today’s episode we are going to take a look at a number of criteria that you can apply in order to select between Agile and waterfall-based project management methodologies.

And let me just say that the title of the presentation… “Criteria for selecting Agile over Waterfall… or not” was intentionally selected to be a bit controversial but I promise that what you will be seeing and hearing in this video will look at many facets and give you a better understanding of the matter at hand.

The reason why we are looking at criteria "for and against" Agile today has to do with the fact that I recently gave a 2.5 hour long webinar presentation for The PDU Podcast. I received great feedback about that presentation and decided to share some of my insights here on The PM Podcast with you.

Once you've heard this episode, you might also be interested in hearing more about the Agile manifesto in project management, and we have a great episode on that too.

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This episode is sponsored by The PMP Exam Simulator:

In today’s episode we are going to take a look at a number of criteria that you can apply in order to select between Agile and waterfall-based project management methodologies.

And let me just say that the title of the presentation… “Criteria for selecting Agile over Waterfall… or not” was intentionally selected to be a bit controversial but I promise that what you will be seeing and hearing in this video will look at many facets and give you a better understanding of the matter at hand.

The reason why we are looking at criteria "for and against" Agile today has to do with the fact that I recently gave a 2.5 hour long webinar presentation for The PDU Podcast. I received great feedback about that presentation and decided to share some of my insights here on The PM Podcast with you.

Once you've listened to this episode, if you want to take the topic further, why not listen to another Agile podcast I recorded on the Agile Manifesto in project management.

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This episode is sponsored by The PMP Exam Simulator:

Bill Duncan (http://www.pmpartners.com) is back in this episode.

When I asked him what topic he would like to focus on for our second interview, he immediately pointed me to his article Defining and Measuring Project Success (http://www.pmpartners.com/resources/defmeas_success.html). In this article and in the interview you’ll hear in just a minute, Duncan gives us his outstanding view of what success means, what is wrong with the way that we define success on projects today and what success dimensions and approaches he suggests that we start applying to our project today in order to improve measuring success. We also look at what you can do today on your ongoing projects to check if you measure success properly and what you can do in order to the measurement criteria in an ongoing project.

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Have you ever had to deal with a sponsor who didn’t really understand his or her role on the project? Maybe you only met them once and then they basically told you to go away and stop bothering them instead of being involved and taking responsibility for what their role on the project is? And by the way... what exactly IS their role? Can we please define that?

Yes we can. To be precise: GAPPS can and in today’s interview I am welcoming Bill Duncan (www.pmpartners.com) to discuss the GAPPS standard for project sponsors (www.globalpmstandards.org).   

In this interview you will not only hear what the GAPPS standard contains in regards to the sponsor role, but you can use it as a means to do a bit of a cross check on your own projects. Bill Duncan has a lot of valuable insights that you may want to use in the discussions with your sponsors.

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So far in our Leadership Podcasts Series we have first heard Rick Valerga and Thomas Juli who are both authors on project leadership discuss their leadership models on expectation management and leadership principles. Then we spoke with Andy Kaufman and we learned how to develop our own leadership skills and those of our team - including the appropriate worksheets for our premium listeners..

Now... it’s time for some hands on project leadership tools.

Enter Susanne Madsen (www.susannemadsen.co.uk) and learn about adaptive project leadership.

Adaptive project leadership is a project leadership tool that will help you identify the appropriate leadership style for your project team members. Just like every project is unique, so are your team members. Your leadership style has to follow suit.

As a special bonus item, Susanne is sharing some free leadership tools. She is making her adaptive leadership white paper and worksheet available to all our listeners. We’re discussing the matrix from this paper in the interview, so you may want to take a look at the filled in matrix on page 3 first. You can manually download the worksheet from pm-podcast.com in episode 191. However, if you use Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or any other app to subscribe to and download our podcasts, then you will very likely already see this file on your computer.

Click here to download the adaptive project leadership white paper and worksheet...

Susanne Madsen has made her white paper & worksheet "Adaptive Leadership" available as a PDF document to all our listeners. Click the link to download it.

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In last week’s episode we gave you tips, tricks and lessons learned how you can improve your project communications with proper use of modern tools. Call them social media tools, call them enterprise 2.0 tools, call them whatever you want. But at the core of using them is the understanding that many problems on projects can be avoided with proper communication and collaboration within your project team.

But there are still unsolved problems on our projects.

In this second interview with Robert Szilinski and Michael Krebs (www.esentri.com and www.social-pm.com) we talk about the need for a flatter top-down hierarchie, combining Agile with waterfall, using enhanced social media concepts for project management and other ways of integrating social media tools into enterprise project management.

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This interview from our PM Podcast Project Leadership Series is another one that I did with Susanne Madsen (www.susannemadsen.co.uk). The project leadership tool that we look at today is... Be The Project Champion.

So you might be wondering what the difference is between a project leader and a project champion? Or whether being a leader doesn’t automatically include the champion aspect? Well... I did too.

The answers to these questions and more will be revealed in today's installment of our leadership podcasts series.

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What would you say is the biggest problem on projects today? Is it the ever increasing complexity? Is it project sponsors who are absent?  Is it the impossible expectations that our customers have?

Robert Szilinski and Michael Krebs (www.esentri.com and www.social-pm.com) say that it’s neither of these. Instead, our top problems are all internal to our project teams. They are communication, collaboration and integration of all team members and their knowledge into the overall project.

Robert and Michael’s answer to help improve project management is to enable our teams to work on a level that is more integrated, based on sharing and trust. Much of this in connection with Social media tools for project management. We’ll get a ton of tips, tricks and lessons learned from how they have used these social media tools on projects.

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The toolkit for project managers in the area of Enterprise 2.0 (often also called Social Media Project Management Tools) is vast. We have wikis, blogs, networking tools, microblogging, videos, podcasts. It’s a sheer endless list of tools that our project participants suddenly expect us to use and be proficient in on our projects.

But where should you start? How should you start? Which tool is appropriate for which task and (almost more importantly) for which target audience. These are just some of the topics that we touch upon in our 2nd interview with Dennis Brooke on Enterprise 2.0 Tools for Project Managers.

We’ll even look at the questions of “Isn't this whole Enterprise 2.0 /Social Media stuff not simply just a gimmick?” and how do we get people to change and use the tools properly?