Best of PPM: January 2022

Let's start with a special shout-out to Elizabeth Harrin for doing a review of the book that kickstarted my decade-long love of all things Project Management: Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun. If you haven't read it yet, and you work in connection with projects, it's a must.

WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION THIS MONTH

• A Renault R&D center holds innovation competitions with a twist. In addition to allowing employees to say whether they like prospective ideas, it allows them to volunteer to help pursue an idea if it gets the green light. (5 min read)
• The surprising impact of meeting-free days. Removing 60% of meetings — the equivalent of three days per week — increased cooperation by 55%. Workers replaced meetings with better ways of connecting one-on-one, at a pace suitable for them, often using project management tools to aid communication. (6 min read)
• Ten project management trends for 2022. Elizabeth Harrin takes a new look at the trends that are shaping project management today, why they are important and what you can do with or about them. (18 min read)
• A military veteran knows why your employees are leaving. In a sense, workers have been deployed and redeployed during COVID-19. But unlike the military, they have no real experience of anything like this. (12 min read)
• Middle managers are the forgotten heroes of innovation. Middle managers form an important bridge between senior leaders and frontline employees. It is middle managers who have the power to give employees the time and motivation to innovate. And it is the middle managers who can make sure that any ideas generated are refined, filtered and, if worthwhile, brought to the attention of senior leaders. (6 min read)
• Please stop using these phrases in meetings. You know which ones we mean. By reframing the way you talk about meetings, you reframe your work. (4 min read)
• How to build a multi-dimensional roadmap. When creating your roadmap, you need to consider what's important to the company (not just to the product) and what is the best way to make progress across these multiple needs. (8 min read)
• Project too have a balance sheet. But it's not the one you expect: instead, it tracks the project's value from the sponsor's perspective vs. the project estimates from the bottom up. (4 min read)
• Dependencies are killing your Agile flow at scale. How do you squeeze out the waste and get the most significant improvement in flow at scale? Reduce the number of structural dependencies in the environment. (6 min read)
• From monolithic systems to microservices: Lessons learned by CIOs leading Agile transformation in the banking and telecom industries. (7 min read)

A QUOTE THAT MADE US THINK

Politics is not a dirty word. Politics is a kind of problem solving.

— Scott Berkun, Making thing Happen