Project Management and Change Articles

Articles

Andre Malowney writing at a desk, working through project management reference texts and printed process diagrams

Practical thinking for project professionals

Articles on project delivery, governance, risk, predictive, Agile and hybrid practice, alongside a growing PMP® knowledge library for professionals preparing for the current exam.

Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement for Different Contexts

One engagement approach across a whole project is too formal for most of it and not formal enough for the part that matters. Three dials do all the adjusting.

Active Listening as a Project Management Tool

People state objections in the most defensible form available to them, which is rarely the real one. The reason underneath only arrives if the first statement is not argued with.

Stakeholder Mapping Is Only the Start

A map built in a room by the project team is a set of hypotheses about people who were not there. What happens in the fortnight afterwards is where the value is.

Validate Scope vs Control Scope: What’s the Difference?

One asks whether a deliverable is acceptable. The other asks whether it is what anybody agreed to build. Teams that run only one find out at handover.

Requirements Elicitation: Why Asking What People Want Is Not Enough

Somebody who has done a job for eleven years has compiled most of it into habit, and habit is not available for description. Elicitation is getting at the quiet parts.

How Scope Works in Adaptive Projects

If the requirements can change, what is anybody agreeing to? Something is always fixed on an adaptive project, and naming it is most of the scope work.