It’s critical to understand how Portfolios, Programmes, Projects and Products — the 4Ps — fit together and how to navigate them in your career. Start here.
Introduction
It’s the new gold rush — product management — but products are not new.
The Gutenburg Bible, the first genuine product, was released in 1455. It wasn’t the first printed book — the Chinese managed this in the 9th Century — but it was the first book planned as a product and evolved based on user feedback and advancements in technology. Since then, products have been around, and the art and science of product management have evolved.
I have on my bookshelf my first book on Product Management, from 2002. Software products still came in boxes then, but it became…
LEADERSHIP
How an old management concept is just as relevant today as it was in the 1970s.
A classic article with new implications — Who’s Got the Monkey?
I recently re-read one of Harvard Business Review’s most bought articles, Management Time: Who’s Got The Monkey? It appears in several of my HBR books — a great way to recycle content. I always enjoy reading it though, because even though it was written in 1974 and updated in 1999, it’s still as relevant today. The language is dated, and the problems have moved on, but the critical point is valid today — who’s got the monkey?
In this case, the ‘monkey’ is the…
Most methodologies prescribe them, yet they don’t work. What can we do about it?
The theory of lessons learned is simple. By asking the right questions at the right time, we can harvest the knowledge gained from conducting a project, both what went well and what didn’t go so well. The idea is to repeat the positives and avoid the same mistakes in future. Over time, performed religiously, we do projects better and better, edging towards perfection.
Different organisations approach this in different ways. Sometimes, PMs complete a document explaining what went well or badly and how others should behave in future. Sometimes, sophisticated databases are used, linking lessons to processes, equipment or specific…
Work has changed forever. Even when we’re back in the office, we’ll need to lead teams that are sometimes in the office for the long term. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned that you can apply too.
Hybrid working is the new norm.
As we start to return to the office, we want to embed what we’ve liked about homeworking but also re-establish the office as a collaboration hub.
However, we’ll need to manage remote teams forever as we all realise that the five-day office week is no longer sustainable for us, our employer or the environment.
As leaders, we need to ensure our…
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
If you are trying to develop your skills, here’s how you should be learning.
Why is workplace learning important?
We live in a world that’s changing quickly. Some of the myriad trends that are changing the workplace include an increasing reliance on innovation and transaction platforms, the rise of automation to replace people, cloud technologies wiping out data centres, electric vehicles wiping out much of the car industry, new farming techniques replacing a lot of manual labour, new construction techniques changing how we build things and disintermediation removing the need for people to connect customers to suppliers etc. …
CAREER MANAGEMENT
If you keep this simple matrix in mind, you will rarely make poor decisions about the opportunities in your career
We’re often faced with decision points in our careers, some large and some very small:
- Paying to do some training yourself
- Asking to go on a training course
- Whether to take a new assignment
- Volunteering your professional or private time to a project
- How to spend that free hour that you have
- Helping a colleague to finish some work on time
Whilst many of us don’t really consider the context of the opportunity, or sometimes even the amount of time you need to complete it, it’s important that you do. There are only 24 hours in a day and you…
SECONDHALFER
What we’ve learned from the experience to better prepare ourselves for old age.
How to prepare for old age
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Both my father-in-law and my uncle were supposed to die first. After all, the life expectancy of men is lower than for women. So, neither family planned for the eventuality that it might be the “wrong way round” and the ladies might die first.
Within one short year, we lost my mother-in-law and my aunt, one to cancer and the other to pneumonia. In the case of my mother-in-law, the cancer was the return of a previous case. The first…
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Why you’re in danger of wasting your training budget without a curriculum in place
My niece spent some time with us recently, visiting from Hong Kong. If you’ve ever been to Hong Kong, or seen it on TV, you’ll know that it has more high rise buildings than just about any city on Earth. You’d therefore think that when I asked her to draw a house for me when she was playing with her crayons that she’d draw the 30 floor building she lives in. No. She drew a rectangular house with a roof, chimney, 4 windows and door. Oh…
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Here is a list of great books and blogs on the process of learning that apply to corporate learning and development, all of which are well-researched and evidenced.
Why learn about learning?
I have long had a passion for professional learning and have been involved in the professional education of project, programme and product professionals for some years.
My argument for learning about learning is that it takes a lot of our time, and will take up more in future. …
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
If you’re a PM or you develop the skills of PMs, here is a useful template of what every PM needs to know
Why do project managers need a development plan?
Learning to become a project manager is an active process, which is best done by simply beginning. I have written about how to do this here.
However, if you choose project or programme management as a career, then you quickly need to have a structured approach to your learning, and a structured way to assess your progress. …
John Davidson
John is a program manager, with a passion for coaching. He writes about the 5Ps — Portfolios, Programs, Projects, Products and Problems, for home and work.
