Torey Quinn's List: Project Management

Lynda.com course, requires active subscription account.

"In Pitching Projects and Products to Executives, author Dane Howard interviews executives and product managers from renowned design firms and corporations like Google, Apple, and Adobe, who share their insider take on how to effectively move projects and product ideas forward. Video and multimedia producer Richard Koci Hernandez weaves the interviews together into a captivating visual narrative. The soft skills course shows the practical techniques, processes, and communication styles employed to sell to executives more effectively, and to bring ideas to life.
Topics include:
Getting and incorporating feedback before the pitch
Creating a list of key stakeholders
Deciding on the format of the meeting
Effective prototyping
Providing an intimate setting
Being succinct and staying on-track
Making the presentation
Closing the deal
Subjects:
Presentatio"

Lynda.com course, requires subscription account.

"Discover how to more efficiently manage your business projects. Author Bonnie Biafore lays out a set of principles and examines the concepts behind project management, from defining the problem, establishing project objectives, and building a project plan to meeting deadlines, managing team resources, and closing the project. The course also provides tips for reporting on project performance, keeping a project on track, and gaining customer acceptance.
Topics include:
Understanding projects and project management
Exploring project management software options
Gathering requirements
Identifying deliverables and success criteria
Creating a scope statement
Identifying stakeholders
Building a work breakdown structure
Identifying resources
Building a schedule
Creating a risk management plan
Developing a change management plan
Understanding team dynamics
Gathering data
Evaluating project schedule and cost performance
Documenting lessons learned
Closing contracts, accounts, and transitioning"

Lynda.com course, requires active subscription account

"Have you wondered how to make your small projects run as smoothly as possible—without building in so many steps that they get cumbersome? In this course, author and project manager Bonnie Biafore shows how a successful small project starts with planning: documenting goals, identifying risks, measuring success, and confirming decision makers. The course also covers organizing your files, estimating time and costs, building a solid team, scheduling work, and getting the project underway. In addition, you'll explore how to hand out and track assignments, communicate with the team, work through issues, and bring your project to a close. This course follows the relocation of a small business as the sample project, but the course's strategies apply to a wide variety of small projects, including those in marketing, business development, product development, software development, freelancing, and the like.
Topics include:
Defining the life cycle and scope of small projects
Identifying the project customer and other stakeholders
Determining the right level of management
Collaborating
Scheduling work
Managing risk
Keeping things moving
Evaluating the project
Getting sign-off and tying up loose ends"

Lynda.com course, requires subscription account.

"Agile project management allows you to produce smaller deliverables more frequently and efficiently, making it an excellent choice for teams that work in product development, programming, business analysis, and other collaborative areas. But it's a fragile process that requires the right scope, goals, and management. In this course, author and Project Management Professional Bob McGannon shows you the tools and techniques you need to successfully manage a project through the agile life cycle. Learn how to use agile for the right projects and then walk through the four major phases in the cycle, from scoping the work and designing your sprint structure to collecting requirements, managing the project without interfering in the rapid build process, adapting to feedback, and closing the project. In the bonus chapter, Bob discusses real-life challenges he's encountered running agile projects, giving you real-world perspective into the project life cycle.
Topics include:
What is agile project management?
Selecting an agile project
Scoping the project
Designing your sprint structure
Collecting requirements
Running stand-up meetings
Managing issues and risks
Tracking lessons learned
Responding to change requests
Closing the project
Spotting signs of trouble"

"Building Consensus with Fist of Five
One of the techniques I use in my teams, as well as in training sessions, is the fist of five. There are a lot of possible uses for this technique (or anything that utilizes a Likert scale), but the one I am most interested in is consensus building. Empowered teams require a different kind of leadership; of the various kinds available – some would find seven – consensus has proven itself over and over to be the most effective in getting empowered teams to increase buy-in, motivate each other, and carry the work to fruition. As such, consensus building techniques are good to develop, and to keep handy.
If you’ve never used the fist of five before for consensus building, here is a brief rundown of how it works. Given a proposal or tentative decision, each team member votes their consensus by holding up one hand with an appropriate number of fingers (or an electronic equivalent in the case of distributed teams). The numbers correspond to a degree of agreement and willingness to move forward with the proposal. One possible, common, key is as follows:"

Download the Enterprise Agility Maturity Matrix via dropbox: http://bit.ly/10hpvxb .

Today’s release of Confluence 5.4 brings JIRA into Confluence – and Confluence into JIRA – like never before, so your team can build better software, faster. When we say seamless integration, we mean it. We’ve made agile best practices the easiest practice, for your team and every team.

"The Clarizen Jira integration provides a seamless connection between R&D issue management and cross departmental project work. R&D team members can manage and prioritize issues in Jira, their existing bug and issue tracking system, while cross departmental teams can easily interact with R&D, receive status updates on development issues and gain project visibility."