We've so far covered quite a few topics around project management - the differences between projects and operations as well as those between projects, programmes and portfolios, the DARCI model for stakeholder engagement.  

A very, very key thing for any project, is its kick-off or the meeting that gets the project team together to get the project started. 

Most kick-off meetings are actually not always effective. Often, that's due to lack of proper preparation or because they're not taken seriously and performed super fast. 

Your kick-off meeting should be long. It's probably the longest meeting you'll run during the entire project. It could even be a whole day or two if your project's length is a year or more. 

But how do you run an effective and productive kick-off meeting?

As a PMI member, I have access to ProjectManagement.com and recently watched a great webinar on that topic so I want to share with you the key learnings. Here we go:

How to Run an Effective Project Kick-off Meeting

With the coronavirus having dramatically shaken our world (although I have my thoughts about this whole thing), many companies are encouraging or even requiring their employees whenever possible to work from home. 

I've been fortunate enough to have worked for two companies where working from home is a normal part of the company culture (and that my job permits for me to work at home). In fact, I work from home most of time now.

But there are a lot of businesses and whole countries even that don't have that basis - working from home has never been the norm, managers distrust team members as they don't have direct, eye control or individuals even struggle to concentrate at home. 

The above issues happen because of lack of experience but if you as a company and as an individual give it a go, I promise you that you'll find working from home a wonderful experience. It makes people more productive and happier due to better work-life balance or as I prefer to call it, work-life integration. 

But truly making this work, requires some planning and thoughtful organisation. 

Here are my top tips about working from home as an individual that I've developed over the last five years.

Would you say customer experience (CX) is one of the key corporate buzzwords in the last few years? 

I'd definitely say so. Alongside digital transformation, it's probably the biggest concern for a lot of companies. 

Why is that? 

Well, because the customer really has become king.

Consumers have never been so empowered as they are before - they have the internet at their fingertips, they make buying decisions on their own through their research and with the help of peer recommendations, they are vocal and complain when the product or service doesn't meet their requirements, reaching hundreds, thousands or millions of people so companies very much depend on the positive experience of consumers to drive sustainable growth.

Businesses have started building their own teams to deal with customer experience - customer success, for example, has never been as important as it is now. 

But what is customer experience and what is customer success? 

I've been covering a lot about influencer marketing over the last few months.

In my latest post about it, I shared how I used to work with influencers. 

I think everyone has their own formula and every brand have their own process or strive to develop their own process but there are some basic, important steps that must always be considered and need to be part of any influencer marketing campaign.

With that in mind, I was quite happy when I stumbled upon a good infographic that explains the roadmap or 10 key steps to run an influencer marketing initiative. 

Before I show it to you, I want to emphasise that the very key thing (and because of that the first step in the roadmap) is to define your goals - what are you trying to achieve, what does influencer marketing mean to your business and how do you expect it to help you with your overall business goals? 

These are some fundamental questions you need to have answered if you are hoping to get budget for influencer marketing. As we all know, every money spending decision must be justified.

To be a successful project manager, one of the key skills you need to have or need to acquire is stakeholder management. This is yet another of the project management fundamentals.  

That's especially important because often you'll be the person responsible for the execution and the success of a project and you'll have a team of people who will be doing the work but they won't report into you directly. 

Being able to influence is crucial so that your team can follow your guidance and requirements, but it's also important even before you start your project - you need to be able to get stakeholder commitment so that you can get the resources you need for your project and have the buy-in of key people in the organisation that will support you in case of difficulties because you'll need to have convinced them of the importance of your project. 

There are typically five strategies for gaining stakeholder commitment. I learned about them from a paper on PMI written by Bill Richardson.

We'll cover them briefly in a second but what I'll also do is to spend time on looking at how these strategies might have to be adapted based on cultural differences.