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What dying tell us about Change Management
All projects involve change but some changes are bigger than others. If changes affect people dramatically such as making them redundant, these changes have to be handled sensitively. To understand how best to do this, some lessons have been drawn from the most...
Risk and Compliance doesn’t float everyone’s boat, so why bother managing it?
Without wanting to over-simplify, Risk and Compliance management are the set of policies and tools that help to keep your business out of hot water. Common areas where you need Risk and Compliance management are: Being compliant with PCI-DSS (for payment cards),...
Hands up…who’d like £300K?
I saved Transport for London £300K a year by installing a new system to manage assets remotely. Want to know what I did? Read on… Previously, at London Tube stations, fire engineers had to visit sites where contractors were operating to manually deactivate...
IT project management 101 – Why IT projects fail
Only 29% of new IT projects implemented by businesses are successful, according to The Standish Group Chaos Report Many more fail to provide any return on investment and a large proportion need to be significantly redone on completion. In this two-part series we are...
Their office was a treat to work in. Their coffee was divine…. But their project management system could do with some improvement.
For context, a week ago I had a meeting with a client who’d been in business for 20 years but needed help. As they became more successful, they realised that their IT project management system was outdated and not up to scratch. They needed a system that would cater...
Taking on the cyber criminals
High profile data breaches at large corporations like Yahoo, Equifax, Target and Sony Pictures have hit the headlines in recent months. But small businesses are also exposed to cyber attacks. Increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks, phishing scams and the...
Key points of GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in May, but many businesses are still in the dark about what it really means for them. IT project management expert Tony Fleming addresses some of the key questions about the regulation and how companies...
The principles of decorating
When Pete downed his first pint in a little over 10 seconds I knew he needed to talk. He and his wife Sue had just spent the afternoon decorating their house and they’d driven each other up the wall with their bickering. When he told me his story I was reminded of how...
The unknown knowns….
“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't...
Lessons learned from going solo (part 2)
This is the second post on ‘Lessons learned from going solo’ – in the previous post Tony Fleming, from Pathfinder Project Management talked about the need to plan out your marketing, why you should ideally set up as a Limited Company and the need for a good...
Lessons learned from going solo (part 1)
I left my salaried job at Transport for London in February 2017 to work as a contract project manager. I was lucky to have friends who were contractors who while supportive and had confidence in me where also quick to point out that a contractor had more...
North Korea, the Tube…and me…
With all the new-found rivalry between US President Donald Trump and North Korean premier Kim Jong-Un, it’s easy to forget that North Korean nuclear ambitions stretch back to his father, Kim Jong-Il (if not earlier), with Kim-senior disrupting one of my projects in...
Is your business card GDPR-compliant?
The moment she said what she said, I groaned inwardly and thought “Oh my God”. But what was the problem? What did she say? Where was I? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin… A few weeks ago, I went to a hotel to attend a breakfast briefing session on the...
GDPR – so, what’s new?
In my last article, I gave a quick heads-up on the fact that a new set of regulations covering Data Protection have come out of Brussels and that the UK government (and by extension, UK businesses) will have to comply by 25 May 2018. I finished off by saying that...
GDPR – what’s the fuss about?
If you’ve been keeping up to speed with current news in the business world, you’ll have heard of the General Data Protection Regulations – or GDPR for short. Coming from the European Union, the GDPR is an extension of Data Protection law which started with the Data...