A Fresh Lick of Paint

History

I launched this website back in 2005 as a resource in support of my business website. It was originally called the ProjExc PM Portal, and it contained a collection of resources that my clients and their project managers could refer to during or after consultancy engagement. It was a collection of free to use templates, advisories, PM tool reviews, links to other PM-related websites, as well as my personal blog.

Early last decade, I found that there was a reasonable amount of site traffic that, rather than coming from consultancy clients, was unexpectedly coming from project managers keen to find resources and learn a little more. There was a lot of interest in the PM Tools section, and looking back this was unsurprising (I'll come back to this point later). As a result I re-launched the site, calling it PM Advisor and added in more about PM Tools, started capturing and sharing PM-related news, but backed off from the blogging which by this time I was doing much more on my work website. Refresh Since launch, the look & feel of PM Advisor has certainly dated, and I've gradually realised the need for a fresh lick of paint.

PM News

Over the last few years I've found the effort needed to keep the news element up to date increasingly onerous, and as a result it has been somewhat neglected. With so many other great websites & bloggers offering the same content it seemed less important. I had been finding that sharing the PM News has been a drain on my time which wasn't delivering value for readers or me, and it was diverting me from analysis and blogging. What's more I have been able to share the bigger stories much more efficiently on Twitter. I'm therefore reducing the emphasis on news, although I will of course discuss the big stores either in my blog on PM Advisor or on my work blog.

PM for SMEs

Over the last 5 years or so I've been spending a good chunk of my time volunteering with my professional body and specifically helping their corporate members get more from their membership locally. Volunteering is amazing, incredibly rewarding, and I would strongly encourage you to volunteer, if you have the capacity.

I'm seeing increasingly, both from my consultancy work and from my volunteering work, that there is a big gap in support for project managers. Project Managers whose day job is project management (either individually or working within big organisations with big PM functions) are really well supported either by their organisation, by their professional bodies, or both. However, there are many, many Project Managers who do some project management as part of their role, but who have other major responsibilities. Most commonly their organisation doesn't have a formal PM function to refer to, and when I speak with them they feel to be very much lacking in support.

This is a big challenge for my profession, as just a little light-touch research suggests that the number of these project managers falling through the gap is much larger than those with the job title. The leaders of these organisations are invariably project sponsors. They don't know what they don't know, and they also lack the support that they deserve.

To do my bit to address this lack of support, I decided to put some more emphasis on what I've called 'PM for SMEs' within PM Advisor.

PM Tools

Over the last decade the PM Tools space has been changing significantly. Many of the older tools have gone by the wayside. There have been considerable investments and consolidations in the PPM tools used by organisations with a sizeable project portfolio. There has been a big growth in the Collaboration type tools, lots of new tools to support agile development projects, and an explosion in personal productivity/small team interworking tools.

In the old PM Advisor there were around 40 separate pages, each dedicated to individual tools and a further 4 pages dedicated to each of the groups of tools. Refreshing PM Advisor has given me an opportunity to rationalise this content and link content to the database of over 200 PM tools that we keep for my consultancy business. I'm updating this currently and this will be added in on the PM Tools section soon. Hopefully this will make it much easier to navigate around PM Advisor and to more quickly find what you are looking for.

New Blog

The other big change is the re-introduction of a PM Advisor Blog. This is the first post, and I already have lots of ideas for future posts, so watch this space. The big trends in the profession I'll keep to my business blog, and here I'll look at new ideas and products in project management, personal productivity, home working, and anything else that catches my eye. If there's something that you'd like me to write about or a new PM ‘thingy’ you think I should promote then I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading, & I hope you'll like the new PM Advisor.