There’s a site called Twittgroups that parses all the tweets for group tokens, words that start with a hash (#) character. One of the groups I like is “Project Managers on Twitter” (#pmot) for instance.

Here are a few tweeters I follow, check ‘em out, they are a cool bunch

Project Management related (at times Agile, PMI or PMP):

• Trev Roberts (very interesting)
• Cornelius Fichtner
• Kelly Waters All About Agile
• Alec Satin
• The ICPM
• PMForum
• William Daniels
• David M. Russell
• Miles Jennings
• Cymberly
• PM Tips
• Project Shrink

Some of my personal PM friends (mostly Dutch):

• Tim Haselaars
• Filip Gezel
• Wim Lockefeer
• Bram Vermeir
• Claudio Capo
• Luc Cardinaels
• Tom Tabruyn

Inspirational tweeters:

• Leo Babauta
• Gretchen
• Orrin Woodward (little bit crazy)
• The Dalai Lama

Don’t forget Twitter search, it’s great if you want to keep up-to-date about what people are tweeting about a specific subject, the service creates RSS feeds of a search so you don’t have to come back to the site. I heartily recommend it.

By the way, please comment should I’ve missed you in the lists!

Here’s a list of good PM behaviors that I think are important:

1. communicate with all the people who are influenced by the project
2. monitor and control the scope, budget and planning constrains
3. understand the content of the project in enough detail to communicate, monitor and control efficiently
4. create situations that allow the team to focus on the project goals
5. help people to get the feedback they need to grow (not the same as coaching)

To give you some context on my list, in my company we create teams around a project most of the time, it’s what the Project Management Body of Knowledge would call a projectized organization.

The point is, you start out with it and maintain it during the course of the project. I never get project charters handed to me in my current work situation, I always write them myself. And I like them short.

According to what I understand from the PMBOK there are 3 things that are absolutely essential for a good project charter, and those are:

• a business case
• the projects constraints
• the assumptions (or dependencies)

Looking at only those 3 things that’s not much is it? Some of the things I always add are:

• high level in scope
• high level out of scope
• communication plan, list of major project stakeholders with their coordinates and roles
• general terms and conditions in the mother language of the sponsor, for legal purposes

I made a mindmap exercise in Freemind a long time ago by looking at some example project charters I got my hands on, the combination I came up with looked a bit like this:

But that’s too long to maintain if you have a high number of relatively short projects to manage.

Today my actual essentials look more like this:

Here’s the big mindmap:

project charter comparison PDF download

Freemind source file (.mm)

I want to share the whole exercise with you, so here you go, source and everything in a variety of formats.

Just leave out all the processes that you don’t need. Whenever you can, do less and keep the processes lightweight.

Doing this will help you and your team to focus.