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Continuous improvement mindset

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Learning lessons from projects

I’ve always had something of a bee in my bonnet about lessons learned. It saddens me to think that many organisations don’t fully exploit the learning that passes under their noses every day from running projects. I have long thought that there must be something that we in the project management community can do to…

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Visualising Data

This week’s webinar with PMO Flashmob was an opportunity to share some ideas with PMO professionals around how to engage senior stakeholders more with the insights they are providing. Many were surprised when one of the polls during the session indicated that the most popular way of sharing information is via Microsoft PowerPoint. I must…

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Strategies for social CPD – Creating a PM community

How learning groups spontaneously form and disperse… A while back I attended an APM focus group facilitated by Dr Michael Moynagh of CPD Futures Ltd on developing strategies to improve the way that project and PMO professionals approach continuing professional development (CPD). One of the topics that came up was that established approaches to CPD (including the approach promoted…

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How to write a ‘Good’ lesson learned?

I was recently asked how to write a ‘good’ Lesson Learned. Many ‘lessons learned’ are merely observations, with no suggestion on how to do things differently. Two or three actionable recommendations are more useful than 20 observations without any suggestions. So this post is about how to write up a Lesson Learned so that it is engaging and…

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What does your PMO stand for?

(well OK, mostly the “P” part…) All over the web you will see people asking or debating what the “P” stands for in PMO. The “MO” stands for “Management Office”, but the “P” can stand for Project, Programme or Portfolio depending on the organisational context. Axelos use the term P3O® to cover all three, but this is also…

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Processes are an organisation’s memory

I’m going to take a calculated risk by standing up for the pragmatic application of process. Yes, that’s right, process. Now, people seem to enjoy a bit of process-bashing, and I get that: nobody wants to have their working lives organised for them to the point where they become a soul-less, heartless, brainless robot, but I am…

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