Alignment in the organization can be considered within multiple aspects. You can think of alignment of goals to organization strategy, IT strategy to business one, mid-management to top-level management, project portfolio to strategic goals or simply communication on the level of the team realizing tasks together.

Zarówno w projektach, w biznesie, jak również w życiu jest jedno proste, ale jed¬nocześnie bardzo skomplikowane słowo. Wpływa na to jak działa organizacja, jak działa projekt czy program. Daje zespo¬łom poczucie celu, pozwala przekonać interesariuszy do inwestowania w dany temat. Jest podstawą efektywności i suk¬cesu w projekcie. Jeśli przyrównać projekt do żywego organizmu byłaby czerwonymi krwinkami, które dostarczają niezbędne do życia składniki do jego komórek. O czym mowa? O komunikacji.

Being a Project Manager you need to act in different roles at once depending on many factors in a certain time. Nowadays in the DNA of the PM there is an ability to play and juggle different roles and responsibilities for the success of the project. You as PM need to be a functional or hierarchical manager, sales person, finance manager, change manager, risk manager etc. at once. Sometimes you ought to be a psychologist as well or even play a role of devil’s advocate to make sure your team will achieve their deliverables in the boundaries of the project. Sounds like you shall see your projects as if they are pictures in a kaleidoscope to lead your Team to success and bring customer satisfaction - from different angles, in different shades and colors.

In every environment and every project there are ups and downs which are teaching you how to act and what to avoid. Retrospectives, lessons learned and post-mortem analysis may sound as buzzwords once you are still on the crest of a wave in your project. What will happen if you fail? In the midst of failure it is even harder to think about them but projects that are not going so well as they suppose to offer the gift of opportunity to re-validate and learn from mistakes.

Managing the project in Scrum like environment may have numerous challenges. They may be related to Scrum framework implementation, team communication, workload management or customer relationship management and many more.

Once you think about basis of planning in a project what can you think of? Do you consider Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), product backlog, people and resources assigned to the project, their availability or maybe task dependencies? If any of them – you are on the right path, however most tricky and misjudged in project planning may appear effort estimation. Estimating includes lots of traps, estimates can also be a trap itself for Project Manager or Project Team. Do you know where the traps lurk in estimating?