Want to prepare yourself for a Project Management Professional certification (PMP certification) exam? First things first: PMBOK stands for "Project Management Body Of Knowledge." The definition of what PMBOK means, directly from the 1st (1996) Edition of the PMBOK Guide, is as follows: "all those topics, subject areas and intellectual process which are involved in
You might have read our blog post, "10 Phrases You Can Never Say When You Delegate a Task." If not, stop what you're doing and read it. It provides insight into some commonly heard phrases in the workplace that hinder everyone's productivity. Maybe you're even saying a few yourself? In response to that article, one of
You read all the literature on micromanagement. You avoid forcing your ideas on your colleagues and friends whenever possible. But you still worry about whether or not you are coming across in a helpful, positive light. ...Or maybe this quiz suddenly appeared in your inbox from an anonymous sender? According to a survey from the book My
With every new project comes the risk of a new project crisis (or two or three). As a project manager, you can't be scared to start just because you're worried about what might go wrong. Instead, it's better to fully prepare yourself for any possibility, and then calmly deal with whatever comes your way. In every
Picture a world where the systems and tools you depend on seamlessly blend into your work style without a hitch, from logging into all your critical systems with the same user credentials to quickly building and sharing custom views of everything that’s going on from the 10,000 foot level down to the most acute details. All
If you really want to start running excellent meetings, this post has some pre-reading. First, check out the four-step guide to any perfect meeting for your business (virtual or otherwise), then head back over here. Virtual meetings have the same issues as face-to-face gatherings, but they come with an extra layer of difficulty. What do you
Meetings. We love them. We hate them. And let's be honest: mostly the latter. For a lot of workers, meetings are synonymous with: "A boring, pointless waste of my time." To change that mentality, we need to change the way we approach our conference calls and boardroom gatherings. Here are four best practices to make sure
If you were handed 20 sticks of uncooked spaghetti, 1 yard of masking tape, 1 yard of string, and 1 marshmallow and then told to build a tower with the marshmallow at the top, what would you do? Believe it or not, this exercise gives us a lot of insight into building high-performance teams. During
Some days are just harder than others. It's the end of a week, or the day after a holiday, or there was yet another office birthday. (Cake-coma, anyone?) When your team is having a hard time focusing on their work, don't just sigh and hope things will change soon. You can actively help them jump back
There are sales teams, and then there are world-class sales teams. What sets the highest achievers apart from the average Joe? We looked at research around the web and, of the many factors that help a sales team run like a well-oiled machine, we were most interested in one particular finding: high-performing sales, sales operations, and
Do you know how many minutes you and your team waste every day? I'm not talking about those "Oops, how did I end up on Facebook again?" occasions; I'm talking about the time wasted on inefficient work: Scouring through email looking for documents Accidentally using outdated information, causing necessary rework Waiting for someone to send
You've come to that point in your management career: work isn't getting done fast enough and your team's emotional well-being is dwindling. Your own stress levels are climbing as pressure from higher-ups increases. You're trying to help your team, but no matter how hard they work, nothing is getting done and they're wilting more every
