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CIO Fortune 500 Hitchhiker's Guide to Saving Money with SaaS PPM
Nick Matteucci - Virtual Teamwork with Real Results By Nick Matteucci on 11/27/2008 6:30 PM
Something is really upsetting you and you just can't get your head around it. You look at the half eaten chicken wrap next to you but you know that isn't it. You worked for years throughout operations, development, and billing. You ability to forge alliances in the business and to deliver consistent results with comparatively small budgets landed you the CIO job. Now that you are here you wonder where "here" is and how to get "there" in this disastrous financial climate. You start reviewing the metrics on your desk you asked for 3 weeks ago and received this morning. The project and portfolio management information you thought would be "real-time" apparently took over a hundreds hours to prepare and nearly shut down the whole management staff. Sigh - 100 hours of effort to produce some simple reports that are already out of date. That will teach you for asking your directors "what is going on?" Looking over the numbers the first one grabs your attention. IT spent over 1,000,000 hours on projec
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SMB CEO Hitchhiker's Guide to Saving Money with SaaS PPM
Nick Matteucci - Virtual Teamwork with Real Results By Nick Matteucci on 11/21/2008 2:00 AM
As a CEO / President of a small business in one of the worst recessions this country has ever seen you better shed excess costs while improving service. Find out how SaaS resource, portfolio, and project management software can dramatically help you cut costs and improve service.
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Finding a PM job in China
Timothy Porter - PM in China By Timothy Porter on 10/14/2008

I've received a few requests for information about how to find a PM job in China.

http://china.recruit.net/

http://www.newchinacareer.com

http://jobs.china.hudson.com/

www.theladders.com

And linkedin.com seems to have a few listings.  I can't vouch for any of these but you can try them.

 

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What's wrong with green hats?
Timothy Porter - PM in China By Timothy Porter on 10/7/2008

Recently a potential partner arrived in China for detailed discussion and negotiation about a long term partnership.  The Chinese are great hosts with extravagant welcoming banquets and small (or not) gifts like Hangzhou's famous Longjin green tea or locally produced silk items.  Understanding this tradition our guests came prepared with several mementos.  One of these was a green (their company color) hat complete with logos and special messages.  Well, there was great reluctance to accept such gifts but our guests persisted in forcing acceptance.  Of course they did not realize that in China "green hats" or Lu Maozi have a special significance.  One is said to have a green hat when your wife has been cheating on you.  And in fact foreigners wearing green hats in public will receive more than their fair share of strange looks and stares.

It ...

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PMs and Communication
Timothy Porter - PM in China By Timothy Porter on 9/25/2008

Looking for good PMs. I was reviewing various lists of reasons why information technology projects fail and found it interesting how seldom communication problems are mentioned.  In our off ...

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Risk Management Lessons from PDS'08
How do projects really save time, cost, and your professional reputation? By Rosemary Hossenlopp on 8/20/2008
ISSIG's project management symposium, PDS'08, was held this summer near Washington DC. It featured many great presentors. One of them was Don Wessels. He discusses "Continuous Risk Management". Click Below to hear the Interview with Don Wessels-PMP.
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Economic pressures lead to 200% increase in new customers of a leading SaaS project management software provider
Nick Matteucci - Virtual Teamwork with Real Results By Nick Matteucci on 8/18/2008 9:58 PM
In a troubled economy, organizations look for new technologies to improve productivity. These companies are increasingly turning to a VCSonline project management SaaS offering, VPMi Professional. VCSonline has reported a 200% increase in new customers this year and expects growth to continue with a new version which includes Microsoft Project integration, supply & demand resource forecasting, dashboards, earned value, and customer billing at a price well below similar competitive offerings.
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Project Management Leadership Lessons from PDS'08
How do projects really save time, cost, and your professional reputation? By Rosemary Hossenlopp on 8/3/2008
PMI's premier IS/IT project management symposium held this summer near Washington DC was a smashing success. This interview is with Pam Nintrup-PMP, the project manager for the event. She discusses how to create a great Information Systems event for project management professionals. Click Below to Play the Interview with Pam Nintrup-PMP.
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Tools for facilitating project communication in an onshore-offshore engagement model
Timothy Porter - PM in China By Timothy Porter on 6/30/2008

I work for Hundsun Technologies which is a Chinese domestic software company that has in the past few years been building a global services business.  With customers in the USA and Europe we have focused a lot of effort in continuously improving our communications processes.  We currently have a project underway to integrate a set of tools to support effective communications.  On our projects project management, architecture and design is typically performed by onshore Hundsun staff  and detailed design, development and testing is typically performed at our offshore development center in Hangzhou, China.

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Man vs. Machine - Who should set the overall status for the project?
Nick Matteucci - Virtual Teamwork with Real Results By Nick Matteucci on 6/29/2008 9:13 AM

Since 1998 we have sold enterprise (and now SaaS) resource, portfolio, and project management software.  One of the most popular features has always been our weekly project and program status reporting tool where the project manager can set the Red/Yellow/Green health status of schedule, scope, resources, budget, and overall project.

What is scary (to me) is that many of our customers want to “over-ride” the Red, Yellow, Green indicators and take health status reporting away from the project managers.

I agree with setting some threshold guidelines around the dimensions of resources, scope, budget, and schedule.  I don't believe they should be cut and dry rules that automatically place the project status.  Let me explain. 

For example they look at our issue logs for aging issues, the number of scope change requests, the deliverables & tasks for late starts, milestone slippage, and resource availabi ...

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