As the cost of living continues to bite, project managers are finding that their salaries aren’t going as far as they used to. A study by Rebel’s Guide to Project Management unveils how far your paycheck will go across the U.S., after cost of living adjustments.

The data reveals that where you live as a project manager can drastically impact your real earnings. In Hawaii, the high cost of living reduces the value of a typical PM salary by over $50,000, while in Oklahoma, lower expenses effectively boost take-home value by around $16,000. Across the U.S., the difference between the best- and worst-value states spans a staggering $66,000, proving that location isn’t just a lifestyle choice, it’s a financial one.

The top 5 states with the highest salaries once adjusted for cost of living are:

1. Oklahoma ($131,679)
2. Arkansas ($125,345)
3. Georgia ($124,861)
4. Kansas ($123,148)
5. Iowa ($121,960)

‌The 5 states with the biggest cost of living impact are:

1. Hawaii (-$50,605)
2. Massachusetts (-$34,659)
3. California (-$23,904)
4. New York (-$23,477)
5. New Jersey (-$23,412)

Rebel’s Guide to Project Management has created an interactive map showing the real value of a salary across the U.S.

Find the map here

“We all know that the cost of living affects salaries, but the difference it makes is significant,” says Elizabeth Harrin of Rebel’s Guide to Project Management. “The difference between the median salaries in top paying and least paying states is about $30k, but when you factor in the impact of cost of living, the result is double that.”

Harrin, who is the author of Managing Multiple Projects, offers the following tips on what job seekers can do to land the best salary:

1. Don’t just look at the number – Adjust for cost of living:

That $110k salary in California might sound tempting, but after rent, groceries, and taxes, you could end up with less take-home than someone earning $95k in Texas. Always adjust for local costs to understand your real earning power.

2. Target high-salary + low-cost states

States like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Indiana offer the best of both worlds: solid project manager salaries and a low cost of living. If you’re open to relocation or remote work, these are goldmines for better financial security.

3. Negotiate with relocation in mind

If you’re applying to a company in a high-COL state, use your knowledge to negotiate. Ask if they are open to discussing compensation that reflects the cost of living, or if they are prepared to offer other benefits or cover your relocation costs.

4. Use data to back up your ask

Citing reliable sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and industry reports in your salary negotiation shows you’ve done your homework, and that your expectations are grounded in market reality.

5. Don’t undervalue remote roles

Remote jobs allow you to earn big-city pay while living in a lower-cost state. If you’re based in Mississippi but working for a San Francisco company, you might pocket thousands more each year than your Bay Area colleagues.

The post New data reveals the best and worst US states for project managers appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

As the momentum from the Great Resignation starts to wane, employees are finding that their bargaining power isn’t what it used to be. About a year ago, job opportunities and rising wages were abundant, but now, those trends are reversing, with fewer openings and slower wage growth. 

A recent comprehensive study of US working trends by Rebel’s Guide to Project Management unveils that the amount of unpaid overtime labor that workers are contributing saw a large uptick in 2023.

They surveyed 3,000 employees, and the data reveals a collective surge of 46 billion unpaid overtime hours in 2023 (in the US, but we can guess that the trend is similar in other countries too), dwarfing figures from the previous year. On average, workers were contributing an additional 4.5 hours per week for no compensation, totaling an extra 233 hours annually.

The survey didn’t only focus on project management professionals, but as many office workers these days have an element of project work, how many of those hours do you think are down to project tasks running over or employees not having the time in the day to complete their project activities alongside their day job?

Residents of New Hampshire are bearing the brunt of this trend, reporting nearly 10 extra hours of unpaid overtime each week. Conversely, Montanans have seen a slight decrease in such hours.

The top 5 states which who worked more in 2023:

1. New Hampshire (9.9 more hours)

2. Iowa (7.6 more hours)

3. Alaska (7.4 more hours)

4. Utah (6.3 more hours)

5. North Carolina (6.1 more hours)

‌The 5 states with the smallest increases in unpaid overtime:

50. Montana (0.6 hours less)

49. Hawaii (0.9 more hours)

48. Idaho (1.9 more hours)

47. Maryland (2.1 more hours)

46. Arizona (2.7 more hours)

45. Arkansas (2.9 more hours)

“We were surprised to see that employees are working over the equivalent of a month’s effort on average – for free, and above and beyond their normal hours,” says Elizabeth Harrin of Rebel’s Guide to Project Management. “We’ve moved beyond quiet quitting and the power is back with employers.” 

According to Harrin, the modern concept of ‘free time’ has evolved. 

“What was once considered personal time has increasingly been ceded to employers,” she says. “The dynamics of work are changing again, and that has implications for managing burnout, fair compensation practices, policy, and more.” 

However, what we are also seeing more of is the type of corporate travel where whole project teams come together in one location for an extended period to work on a particular part of a project. This has proved to increase productivity so the added expense of travel and accommodation for a whole team is seen as a cost-effective solution to delivering successful projects. Organisations will tend to lease serviced accommodation to house employees that have good amenities and communal spaces – the end-result being that motivation is also boosted. Maybe more extended business trips – that boost productivity and staff motivation – could be yet another way of working that enables ‘free time’ to be regained when those employees are back at home base.

‌Harrin, who is the author of Managing Multiple Projects, provides the following tips on what employees can do to be more efficient with their time and reduce their working hours:

1. Track Time: Log your work hours to identify patterns of unpaid labor. Use this data to discuss workload with your employer, and negotiate fair compensation for overtime hours, especially when taking on roles that extend beyond the typical workday.

2. Set Boundaries: Clearly define work hours and stick to them. Use your out of office message to let people know when you will next be available, and don’t download work apps to your personal phone.

3. Prioritize Ruthlessly: Focus on tasks that align with key project goals. If it’s not critical, delegate or defer it.

4. Leverage Technology: Automate repetitive tasks and learn how to use all the features of project management tools to streamline workflows.

5. Communicate Efficiently: Opt for asynchronous communication when possible to avoid unnecessary meetings. Use AI assistants to summarize meeting takeaways and create minutes.

6. Educate Yourself: Understand the labor laws and regulations regarding overtime. Know your rights and when to seek guidance.

7. Lead by Example: Don’t expect colleagues to work uncompensated overtime.  Manage your own hours and advocate for employees and peers for fair compensation. 

The post How many hours overtime do you work? appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

Now in its sixth year, The Business Book Awards celebrate the quality and variety of business books and offer industry-wide recognition to new and established authors writing on a range of subjects for a diverse readership. Following another year of personal and professional challenges for business people, the 2023 awards cover 14 different categories to reflect the wide range of knowledge and experience required for business success in 2023.

This year 300 books from business leaders and entrepreneurs across the globe were entered into the awards, and Elizabeth Harrin is delighted to have been shortlisted for her book, Managing Multiple Projects: How Project Managers Can Balance Priorities, Manage Expectations and Increase Productivity. Aimed at people in all kinds of roles who work in projects as part of their job, Managing Multiple Projects will help you develop the skills and knowledge to juggle your workload while avoiding burnout.

Elizabeth said, “This is the book I wish I had read when I started taking on more projects. Combined with the templates that come with the book, readers tell me it has changed the way they work.”

So much of project management training is focused on leading one project successfully, and Elizabeth says she wrote the book to deal with the reality of what modern work is all about: most people involved in projects have to juggle the expectations and deadlines of more than one.

“Project management processes don’t scale up to allow us to streamline and work smarter,” Elizabeth adds. “When you work differently, you can save time and also avoid burning out your team, stakeholders and yourself.”

Managing Multiple Projects is one of eight finalist books within the Specialist Business Book category, with winners of The Business Book Awards 2023 being announced in London on Tuesday 16^th May 2023.

To find out more, visit https://www.businessbookawards.co.uk/.

Elizabeth Harrin is available for interview. Please contact her via her project management blog or LinkedIn.

The post Managing Multiple Projects Shortlisted for Business Book Awards 2023 appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

The cities listed include:

• Shanghai
• Las Vegas
• Seattle
• Washington DC and metro area
• London
• Brisbane
• Sydney
• Warsaw
• Tokyo
• NEOM

Buenventura also makes the list in 11th place, noted for the SeaOne Caribbean Fuel Supply project in the Puerto Solo complex. This is the leading infrastructure project in Latin America, worth around US$20bn.

“I’m an ex-corporate project manager and I was based in London for 12 years,” Elizabeth says, “so I suppose it’s kind of inevitable that I was drawn to the huge range of projects happening in ‘my’ city. London came out of my research as a hotspot for jobs. The average salary for a project manager in the UK is about £62k, with higher salaries to be expected in the capital.”

Nearly one in five UK project professionals – 19% – believe they will get a pay rise of 5% of more in the next 12 months.

“It was amazing to research more into other areas of the world and the investment happening in cities globally,” she adds.

Warsaw, for example, is a hub of investment for major projects at the moment, with 11 initiatives together slated to receive over €2bn of EU funding. “Tokyo also made it on to the Global Liveability Index for being one of the top 10 cities where it is nice to live,” Elizabeth says.

Two Australian cities made it on to the list: Sydney and Brisbane.

“There are large infrastructure projects happening in Brisbane, with a good quality of life and high salaries,” says Elizabeth. “But project management isn’t just about large construction work. There’s lots of government projects, cutting edge initiatives and a strong start-up scene that makes it a great place for people making projects their career.”

Local project manager and podcaster Elise Stevens agrees: “The best thing about working in Brisbane is that because it is smaller, there is an eclectic atmosphere,” she says. Elise says that if you want to work in Brisbane, you have to have a good network. “Informal references play a big part in how people get work,” she adds. “It can be tough to get the first gig however once you have a better network it is easier.”

The analysis looked at number of jobs, hotspots for megaprojects and investment, salaries and financial confidence in working project managers, and how many project professionals reported having informal or formal career paths (at a national level). This was blended with a sprinkle of professional judgement and a desire to represent cities from various parts of the world to create the final list.

The post Top 10 Cities for Project Management Uncovered appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

I told her that the normal approach project managers follow is to tailor communication to the needs of the stakeholders, explaining how for some of my stakeholders I’ll create a formal report while others just get a text message.

When I tell people this, I often get the same response. But that’s so much work!

Yes. Yes, it is.

Creating bespoke communications for individual stakeholders, based on how they want to communicate is a ton of extra work for you, the project manager.

And it’s not just communication. The whole pattern of doing the work seems to fall apart because of the diversity of preferences and styles between colleagues.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for diversity. Studies show that diverse teams make better decisions. There are many known benefits from creating diverse workplaces, not least improved financial results for your business. (Don’t believe me? Read Why Women Mean Business by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, and you’ll soon see.)

But the more work preferences there are in the team, the more busy work a project manager has to do to ensure everyone’s needs are met.

Meeting the needs of cross-generational teams

Boomers. Gen X. Millennials. Gen Z. Xennials. I didn’t even know that generation existed until last week when someone told me on Twitter they were part of the Xennial generation – the group sandwiched between Gen X and Millennials!

No one seems to know how to work together anymore. Not in a way that feels effortless and easy. My life is one constant round of tailoring to help my team do their best work.

It shouldn’t be like that. We should be able to find ways to work together, across generational and departmental divisions. We’re all in it for the same reason, after all. To deliver whatever projects help get our organizations that next step forward. Everyone can buy into that, so we need tools to help support the way we all want to work.

Work has fundamentally changed

The challenge is that the work itself has fundamentally changed. Our digital revolution has pushed more and more work online, and our organization’s customers and clients are online too. Response times are shorter than ever. Delivery dates for projects are constantly brought forward to meet competitive pressure and consumer demand.

Honestly, working like this is fun. I love blending online and offline tools to work with colleagues to deliver our strategy. It’s fast-paced. It’s interesting. But my goodness, I don’t want to be on track for burnout in a few years. We’re crying out for systems that help us do projects in a faster, slicker, more collaborative way, and juggle all the BAU stuff too.

The switch to Work Operating Systems

One of the biggest challenges I have is that I run projects, but also have non-project work. All my project team colleagues have the same issue. They act as subject matter experts and team members for other projects. They also have day job responsibilities.

It’s tough to track your personal To Do list when you’ve got three different project managers and your boss asking you for status updates.

My notebook has a To Do list page for each category of work I do, and what tends to happen is whatever page I open it at in the morning is where I spend most of that day. It doesn’t help me prioritize my workload, interact with the people who are important today or stay on top of the important tasks that I really should be doing.

But there is another way. Work operating systems like monday.com work across generations, and across the BAU/project divide. Regardless of your approach to work, tools can close the generation gap because they bring people together. A work OS lets you work the way you want to and get to know the work preferences of your colleagues. Oversight into everyone’s work provides the immediate feedback some team mates will crave, and yet provides autonomy for the team to make their own decisions. The more different generations understand each other, the more we can break down preconceptions of what it means to be a boomer or a millennial.

They help manage workflows, keep your boss in the loop, and liberate teams from mundane tasks.

They work on mobile devices, and have a virtually non-existent learning curve that means even the most tech-phobic person in the team can use them.

Work operating systems plan, run, and track everyday work as well as the things we think of as projects. So they suit teams that have hybrid responsibilities. All your stuff is in one place.

Automate routine work

Built in workflows make it easy for task handoffs, and by standardizing the way work moves through the project team, we can create repeatable processes.

I love the idea of reliable repeatability because it means I don’t have to think about the next step: the process guides me through it, every time.

If the out-of-the-box workflows don’t do it for you, a good work operating system will let you create your own. The more you can automate, the more time you can spend on the tasks where you really add value, like the face-to-face interaction with key stakeholders or customers.

Built-in tailoring

Work operating systems are different from project management tools in that they do more than simply help you plan project tasks. This is great, because even as a project manager, I have stuff to do that isn’t on my project plan, like process reviews for the PMO, ad hoc reports for my manager, mentoring other project managers and then following up, even organizing the occasional team social event.

The flexibility of a work operating system means you can tailor how you use it to the work you do. It also means that any data in the system can become part of a report. Result! We all know how much project executives love to have tailored dashboards. The more you can make it easy for everyone to see their own metrics – the things that matter to them – the fewer ad hoc requests you’ll get for project reporting.

Transparency by default

The other thing I love about the idea of work operating systems is that the transparency is there. When your team use it for everything, there is nowhere to hide. When your colleague tells you they haven’t done a project task because BAU work took precedent, you can ask them to show you… and find out what they’ve really been working on! (Note: only do this if the trust levels in your team leave something to be desired, otherwise you’ll jeopardise the working relationship you have with your colleagues by coming across as an annoying micromanager – there are quite a few generations who won’t appreciate that.)

You can easily see the outcomes of the project team’s work – and so can everyone else (within their designated security permissions, of course). This approach takes away a lot of the nervousness I sometimes see in project teams, when they think they aren’t being give the whole picture. I’m a big fan of transparency, and in a work operating system, it’s all laid out for you. Whatever metrics you track can be played back, so you get a single version of the truth at all times.

It is possible to work smarter, provide tailored solutions to the people who want them and meet the needs of a diverse project team. You just need tools that support the complexities of the modern, virtual, cross-generational workplace. Try a work operating system and put your tools to work for you.

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.

The post Why We Need Cross-Generational Tools appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

There’s a new change management ebook by Elizabeth Harrin that will help you manage project communications on your change initiative.

Communicating Change: How To Talk About Project Change is a guide to:

• How to plan your project communications strategy
• How to work out which tools will be the best for your project
• How to get the right message to the right people at the right time – with the right action as a result
• How to evaluate the effectiveness of your project communications so you can do more (or less) of that next time.

This is a complete guide to what to say in your project communications and how to say it.

Written as a step-by-step guide, it aims to help project managers, change managers and business team leaders get people to finally understand what the project is trying to do, cascade to their teams and do their part!

This book makes it easier for you to start talking, writing, presenting and sharing about your project in a way that takes the comms planning process and makes it as low stress as possible.

Because project managers have enough to do without having to worry about communications as well!

Communicating Change is available only as an ebook. Priced at only £8.99 it’s a cost-effective way to get to grips with stakeholder communications, be better prepared and grow the level of support for your project.

Here’s what people are saying:

“The book is great resource that you can quickly work through to help identify and successfully manage the communication requirements of your project. Also recommended for the more experienced change or project manager who is using a standard communication plan for each project (we’ve all been there!) and who would benefit from a quick refresher and an updated approach.” Caroline Harper, Corporate Lead ICT and Digital, local government

“A great primer on communicating change. Elizabeth provides practical advice on how to communicate change and includes examples/ideas to use in your project. If you follow the ideas in the book then you will exceed your stakeholders’ expectations.” Elise Stevens, project leadership coach and mentor

At 65 pages long, it’s comprehensive enough to give you everything you need while letting you get started quickly.

Get your change management ebook here (PDF or Kindle, or you can read it through the publisher’s online library).

About The Author: Elizabeth Harrin

Elizabeth Harrin, MA, FAPM, MBCS runs Otobos Consultants Ltd, a project communications consultancy specialising in copywriting for project management firms. Elizabeth also works as a practicing project and program manager. She spent eight years working in financial services before moving into healthcare.

Elizabeth is a PRINCE2, MSP and P3O Practitioner, and holds the ITIL Foundation certificate. She is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management and a member of PMI. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University.

She is the author of several books about project management including Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World (which was a finalist in the Management Book of the Year Awards 2014 and now in its second edition), Collaboration Tools for Project Managers, Communicating Change, and Customer-Centric Project Management. Elizabeth has also produced several ebooks and an online course on project reporting.

Elizabeth is the award-winning blogger behind Rebel’s Guide to Project Management, a specialist blog aimed at helping teams get work done with less stress. She is widely published on project management topics and has contributed to numerous websites and magazines.

The post New Change Management Ebook: Communicating Change appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

Is PrimaveraReader the solution to needing a Primavera licence for everyone on your team – even people who only need to look at the schedule without making changes? We review whether this tool can cut costs and improve productivity for your project team.

Primavera is one of the top project management solutions out there, but it’s such a feature-rich product that it often isn’t necessary for everyone on the team to have their own installation of it, especially if all they need to do is access project schedules to check progress. If they aren’t editing the plan, then they don’t really need their own licence.

The difficulties this brings is that it creates more work for the project manager. They have to print schedules (or at least PDF-them and email them to the team). They have to do all the updates themselves. And team members have a handy ‘get out of jail’ card: without the ability to check their tasks for themselves they could use the excuse that they didn’t know what was coming up.

But Oracle has this functionality already – the add on tools like the TeamMember mobile app are designed for this purpose. They let you share information with the team without needing to give them the whole Primavera tool suite.

However, not every business is prepared to invest the time and money into the full web solution for Primavera P6. It’s a significant piece of work to move your whole business to using the solution fully, and if you aren’t yet ready to make that commitment, but you still love the features and flexibility of P6, then you’re limited with what your team members can do.

Enter PrimaveraReader

PrimaveraReader is a stand-alone software app that lets you open, view and print your Primavera XER and XLS files. And you don’t need Primavera installed on your device. Consider it the Adobe Acrobat of Primavera – a way to open files in a format that feels familiar but that offers only the functionality they need.

It’s perfect for teams that need the professionalism of Primavera, but not for everyone.

Key Features

Opening a file in PrimaveraReader is easy. It looks like P6 but it doesn’t have all the features you’d expect in the full product. For example, you can’t create new projects or add new tasks.

However, it does what it says it does: it lets people in the team see the schedule without needing to give them access to the full package. They can even see variance to baseline to compare different versions of the schedule.

The benefits to the project manager are clear:

• Team members can’t accidentally (or deliberately) change parts of the schedule
• You can get project updates from the team in a way that feels ‘native’. In other words, it’s aligned to what they see if you share the full P6 plan in a team meeting or web conference. The team can talk about the schedule in the same way as it appears on the screen.
• Project managers don’t have to type out task lists or create sub-plans in spreadsheets just to get a To Do list for their team.
• No need to create limiting PDFs. You can navigate around the schedule as if you were in P6. It’s not a screenshot of the plan, it’s like having the real thing.
• It’s faster than importing and sharing files directly in P6.

There are some other good features worth calling out.

Trace Logic View: A relatively new addition to the tool. You can use this for detailed analysis of your schedule. It shows you selected segments of the schedule with predecessor and successor activities. The critical path arrows are also highlighted in red. Great for digging into schedule dependencies.

Critical Path: As you’d expect from a project scheduling solution, critical path analysis is a feature. You can easily see the chain of activities that make up the critical path which determines the project’s end date. Helpful for checking that everyone knows what’s on the critical path so they can manage around those activities and ensure the dates are protected.

Driving Activities: This goes beyond critical path and flags up activities that have significant importance in relation to the completion date for the project. These are the tasks that drive the project. Pinpointing them lets the team see where they should be spending their time.

System Limitations

The system is really only good for one thing: it just does Primavera file viewing. There’s no integration with P6 so you can’t edit a file and have the updates upload into your original schedule. It doesn’t integrate with any other tools either (although you can import Excel files).

You can only view one file at a time, so if you’ve got multiple projects on the go you’ll have to close and open each time.

While it’s not essential right now, in the future it would be good to see the tool updated to include support for XML files. Primavera P6 EPPM uses only XML, so it’s going to be important for future releases that PrimaveraReader moves to support this too.

You are only getting a ‘read’ view so the customization options aren’t there unless you create a customized view in Primavera and then export using that. You can use custom filters though.

The help feature isn’t as intuitive as it could be either.

In Summary

While the system has limitations, it is good at doing what it is supposed to. It’s not supposed to be an all-singing, all-dancing customizable version of your project plan: that’s what P6 is for. It’s a lightweight viewer aimed at saving your team time, your business money and your stakeholders’ sanity when it comes to tracking progress effectively.

Overall, PrimaveraReader is a cost-effective alternative for teams who want the power of Primavera at project manager level but without the overhead and learning curve for people in the team.

PrimaveraReader is not a product of Oracle®, nor is it endorsed, sponsored or affiliated with or by Oracle. Oracle® and P6® are registered trade marks and brands of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

The post Software review: PrimaveraReader appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

New research from Elizabeth Harrin shows that project managers understand the value of the stakeholder analysis process and stakeholder management but in many cases they aren’t doing it (or aren’t able to do it).

Engaging stakeholders on projects is essential for success. The survey, conducted at the end of last year via Elizabeth’s blog, GirlsGuideToPM.com, included responses from over 300 project managers worldwide. They reported that the value of stakeholder management is clear. It:

• Helps manage risk
• Improves the perception of success
• Improves project handovers
• Helps secure resources
• Ensures the team does what is required.

Doing stakeholder management well, and moving beyond the obligation to document a list of people affected by a project on some kind of log, has a real impact on being able to deliver your project successfully. When you know that it can help you smooth out issues on your project and get work done more effectively, wouldn’t you prioritise doing it?

That doesn’t seem to be the case. Project managers are prevented from doing effective stakeholder management for a number of reasons including not having management support (45%), not having enough time to do it when juggling their other responsibilities (48%) and not having the templates to set the processes up (27%).

Constrains on stakeholders’ time came up multiple times in the comments that respondents added to their survey results. “This seems to be a real issue for people,” Elizabeth says. “When your stakeholders don’t give you the time you need with them, your project suffers because you can’t get the direction and decisions that help you keep moving forward.”

In response to the survey results, Elizabeth has put together a Masterclass on stakeholder management to help project managers create better working relationships with stakeholders and customers.

“The difficulty with stakeholder management is that there is no magic wand,” she says. “It’s impossible to hand out a formula that would work in every situation, for every business, for every project, and that’s where much of the formal teaching about stakeholder management falls down. We give people the templates and processes but we don’t explain how to actually move people’s positions, or share the techniques that really work.”

Much of that hard-won knowledge comes from experience, and that’s difficult to get for someone new to the role. Equally, even mid-level career professionals can struggle when faced with a difficult set of personalities or a particularly challenging project.

Elizabeth’s Masterclass is a shortcut to gaining that knowledge, packed with practical tips to navigate the difficult terrain of stakeholder relationships. “What I can do is give you the tools, techniques and confidence to boost your stakeholder relationships at work so you can effectively decide which way on the map to go,” she adds.

Unlike lots of online training classes, the Stakeholder Management Masterclass will be delivered live over 4 weeks. “I’ve already had students sign up from overseas who know now that they won’t be able to make the live classes,” Elizabeth explains. “They’ll be getting information in advance of the classes so they can still ask their questions and then they can watch the replays. I hope I’ve created an engaging format that will allow me to tailor the course and enable delegates to get the most out of it.”

Elizabeth’s objective is that she can give project managers the confidence to engage with project stakeholders – even the difficult ones. When you have confidence, and the techniques, you can build credibility and authority at work and put together a clear engagement plan for working with others on the project.

Read the full research results.

The post Learn How To Succeed At Stakeholder Management appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

LA HABRA, Aug 29, 2013 – Returning to work after the summer is the time when most project managers focus their minds on getting things straight on their projects, says Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com.

“We work with clients across several industries and we see the same thing each year,” he says. “This is the best time of year for adopting new habits – people are far more likely to stick to them than at New Year.”

There are plenty of things that you can do to get your projects in shape. Updating risk and issue logs, reviewing your project communication plan and setting up meetings for the rest of the year are just some of the simple tasks people add to their To Do lists when they return from their holidays.

“It’s also a busy time for clients evaluating new project management software tools,” Westland adds. “Companies are keen to make an investment before the end of the year, and to get the tool installed and operational before the end of year break.”

September is the traditional ‘back to school’ time for children returning to the classroom after the long summer holiday, but the same applies to project managers and other workers as well. “Feeling refreshed after the summer break, whether you went out of the country or took a ‘staycation’, means that you can approach your project with a fresh outlook and a positive attitude,” Westland says. “What changes can you make to your working environment or your project so that you face the rest of the year in a better shape?”

About ProjectManager.com

ProjectManager.com was founded in 2008 by four guys who wanted to create a better toolset for managing projects. Within 12 months of going live, the company grew to 25 staff and produced a healthy revenue stream. Now with customers in more than 100 countries, ProjectManager.com is one of the fastest growing project management service providers on the net. More than 70% of customers are based in the USA with organizations like NASA, United Nations, Boeing and Volvo all managing projects using the ProjectManager.com platform.

Website: http://www.projectmanager.com/

The post Get your projects in shape in September appeared first on Project Accelerator News.

LA HABRA, Aug 1, 2013 – The recent release of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—Fifth Edition finally addresses the issue of stakeholder management, providing much-needed guidance, according to Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com.

“Working with clients in many industries we are very aware of the issues that project managers have when dealing with stakeholders,” he says. “The lack of formal guidance on the topic of stakeholder engagement was a challenge for many people, and it’s great to see the latest PMBOK® Guide covering this in detail.”

The revised PMBOK® Guide includes the new Knowledge Area of Project Stakeholder Management. “We’ve always championed collaboration as the best way to get projects done, and the need for interaction is specifically mentioned in the guidance,” Westland adds. “Interactive communication, such as instant messaging and discussions, whether in person or online, means finding collaborative ways for team members to work together to achieve a successful outcome on a project.”

The new Knowledge Area covers planning and managing stakeholder engagement through a number of tools, techniques and processes. “Today, with so many teams working virtually, the old ways of stakeholder management no longer work,” Westland says. “Project managers have to be up-to-date with how online collaboration and project management software can help, as these are essential communication tools to ensure that everyone has one view of the truth on a project.”

About ProjectManager.com

ProjectManager.com was founded in 2008 by four guys who wanted to create a better toolset for managing projects. Within 12 months of going live, the company grew to 25 staff and produced a healthy revenue stream. Now with customers in more than 100 countries, ProjectManager.com is one of the fastest growing project management service providers on the net. More than 70% of customers are based in the USA with organizations like NASA, United Nations, Boeing and Volvo all managing projects using the ProjectManager.com platform.

Website: http://www.projectmanager.com/

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