Alison Meier

There’s a tight link between project management and budgets. Preparing a project budget requires thinking through the project in detail before anyone starts working.

Project managers often have it easier than a CEO does when grooming a replacement. This article examines 8 essential steps for planning for your successor.

Collaborative leverage is the ability to apply the right technology to the right process at the right time with the right people. It’s a concept I developed for my company, Collaborative Strategies, Inc., which talks about how to integrate collaboration into a work stream for the best adoption and highest return.

The watchword for a successful project is clarity. To set your team up for success, you have to be clear about your project’s objectives as well as each team member’s role and responsibilities. Before getting your project started, break down pre-project preparations into these five steps

As project managers, we continuously need to look for better ways of optimizing how we work. As society increasingly expects all projects to succeed, professionals must rethink the tactics and software used to best achieve project management. But there’s a catch for businesses that want to excel in a competitive environment.

If you’ve followed any of my LiquidPlanner blog posts, then you know the majority of my experience focuses on project management in an IT environment. Opportunities for software solutions are everywhere, you just need to look in the right places – and these places won’t likely be in your own workplace.

Today’s projects don’t typically take 120 years to finish, and leadership doesn’t usually come in the form of a royal couple whose organization is a European country. But that was the Renaissance in project management for you. Still, history has its persevering way of giving us wisdom for the ages. Here are four epic renaissance projects and partnerships—and the lessons they model for our 21st century projects.

How do you promote the good work you do without pounding your chest? Project managers, and any of us with career aspirations, have to find ways to let our bosses know what we're doing and how we’re succeeding. Demonstrating–and highlighting–success are prerequisites for career advancement, but no one wants to be tagged as a boring boaster. You want to self-promote with grace, confidence and comfort.

There comes a time in almost every project manager’s career when he or she needs to give away a project. There are many reasons why this happens: you were given a critical project and need to lighten your workload; the project requires skills that are better suited to another PM; you have a higher priority project that needs your full attention; or – gulp! – the client wants someone else to manage their project. (This last one never feels good, but it happens.)

Working on a team presents a unique set of challenges — something that just happens when you put more than one person in a room and ask them to achieve a goal together. The challenges are as old as primitive man, but this doesn’t mean we have to accept these hardships. With a little self-examination and some good behavior habits, you can become a highly valued member of your team – and increase the value you have on your group and the project.