Unfortunately there are some projects you work on that end up having lots of stakeholders who all want a piece of the action. While this is useful and you can delegate tasks and responsibilities to active team members who are keen to support, there are some times when you need to tighten the control of the tasks and project, and ensure that the communication remains strong and via the correct channels.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as The New York Post, tells it, is “so rattled by the launch of Microsoft’s rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service.”
I came across this article and image today and it brought a smile to my face: http://bit.ly/EWB9i
Working with a project team can sometimes be a struggle, especially if some team members are not on board with the overall project and goal.
It can be difficult to get them on-side and working as effectively as possible and this could be down to a number of reasons.
Here are my top 5 tips to ensure your project team is happy and full of beans!
Researching some information recently on the net, I came across this article, which was quite useful since this is something we’re actively working on currently.
I think the main point is:
“Social networking is a love-hate relationship. On the one hand managers want their workers to experiment so they can cultivate new-world skills. Employees as brand ambassadors! Products virally transformed into overnight hits!
On the other hand, bosses are filled with foreboding about social networking’s dark side—losing secrets to rivals, the corporate embarrassment of errant employee tweets, becoming the latest victim of a venomous crowd.”
If your employees are actively using Social Media to start work-related discussions, you must have a Social Media Strategy in place to safeguard both the reputation company and the obligations of the employee.
The UK’s most widely used Project Management methodology and framework; PRINCE2, is getting an update for 2009.
The name will remain the same but there are some clear enhancements and changes to the method.
PRINCE2 has previously gone through two major changes – in 2002 and 2005. The new changes are based around creating a simpler and clearer model that, evidence has shown, will contribute to the delivery of successful projects.
The new 2009 PRINCE2 will provide a more streamlined, simpler and more customisable method to be applied to projects. Clear clarification on roles and responsibilities is enforced and the language of the new methodology is easier to understand, ensuring project managers have a better set of tools with which to deliver projects on time, within budget and to the correct quality criteria.
I’m a massive fan of Netvibes (and have been for what seems donkeys ages), I think they were the original platform to create a personalised landing page for users to integrate all their news, information and feeds (please correct me if I’m wrong!).
Their latest upgrade is to add Multiple Personalised Pages (MPPs). This basically means that you can have an unlimited amount of tabs categorised into an unlimited amount of pages, ensuring that all your content can be managed and structured into any logical format that you want!
This, I believe, is a great step forward for the progression of Netvibes as the limitations in one page with many tabs has always been a frustration for me and many others. You can set up your personal page, your “social” page, your business page – anything you want – and manage a range of content, widgets, feeds etc. in a fast and super efficient manner.
It is also a massive boost for Enterprise clients (and branded microsites such as The Daily Influence by Ogilvy) who can now structure masses of data into a page for each area of the business e.g. IT, Marketing, Digital, HR, Finance…the possibilities go on.
The only issue now is that, at this point in time – 20:56 on 27th May 09, the Netvibes server is running amazingly slow! I guess this is down to all the Netvibes users trying out the new feature and creating millions of extra pages!
I’ll have to wait a few days to set up all my tabs into their new pages.
Thanks,
Tony
YouTube have recently pushed this crazy statistic out of the door: 20 hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds.
In fact, just in the time it took me to write up this article, 40 hours of rubbish video was added to the site…
Interestingly, this news comes only a few months after it was discovered that in the United States, more searches are made on YouTube than on the whole of Yahoo.
Don’t get me wrong – there is a lot of funny and good video on YouTube, but I think the majority of it is complete garbage and should be removed as quickly as it can be uploaded!
I’ve worked with a few in my time and I was pondering this the other day when a friend told me they didn’t rate someone as a good Project Manager.
I’m sure there are more than 5 traits but these are the main ones that hit me square in the face when I thought of the main traits of bad project managers.
Over the last 24 hours I’ve migrated all my domain names and the Project Cake Wordpress blog to a new server based in Australia. On a scale of 1 to 10 for my technical skills and knowledge I’d probably but myself around a 7 – I’m not too bad and do have experience, but sometimes things will crop up and just completely stump me.
Here is a quick breakdown of the experience I had…
There may be valid reasons why some of these things happened, and I didn’t really investigate them too much due to wanting to spend the time as productively as possible trying to get the site back up and running, but you need to be aware of these potential problems prior to starting a migration process…
Thanks,
Tony
Tony Burke is a Program & Project Manager for IT and web business applications.
He's particularly interested in the latest online trends and technologies, project management methodologies and providing the best service possible for his company and clients.
He's also a bit of a geek and footballer.