The Empire State Building was built in just 410 days. Disneyland was brought to life in 366 days. The Javascript language was prototyped in 10 days, and launched 4 months later.

How were these and other major feats accomplished so quickly? And what lessons do they hold for managers looking to deliver fast today? 

You can't be a PM or business owner without a deep understanding of machine learning: establishing the business value and then rallying a team to deliver to that value without falling into the many unique pitfalls of ML programs. Here is a "cheat sheet" compilation of how to deliver machine learning products and programs, highlighting practical tips from someone who's been on the journey.

There's a vast difference between an average project manager and an excellent project manager. But if you google "What makes a great project manager?", you find only generic lists of qualities: organized, good communicator, blah blah blah.

Of course it's important to be organized and communicate well. But that's just the starting point. Let's get more specific. What are the traits are we looking for that truly separate the top tier PMs from all the rest?​

After running programs using Scrum methodology since 2005, I thought I knew a lot about Scrum. Until I finally did a Scrum Alliance course and learned that there are many misconceptions that 99% of the world does not get right about Scrum. Here's my top 12 list of surprising Scrum facts.

SaaS businesses are all the rage! Even companies that have success with traditional products are re-thinking their business as a SaaS offering, to reap the many benefits:

• Valuation. Even if all you sell is basically the same product to the same customers, but on a "SaaS" model, that can be enough to attract new investors and increase your valuation by an order of magnitude.
• Recurring revenue. SaaS implies a subscription model, which lends itself to more recurring revenue, or at least more predictable recurring revenue.
• Additional revenue streams. SaaS businesses can collect and monetize anonymized customer data, including patterns of customer behaviour. They can serve ads to different customer segments, or upsell partnering products.
• Product stickiness. Customer behaviour data can be analyzed to quickly assess how to make the product more sticky. Feature "experiments" can be run on different customer segments.
• Reduced operational costs. Cloud technology can theoretically allow for a zero IT footprint on the client site, reducing deployment and support costs. And because SaaS is also usually "self-service" ie. purchased and upgraded directly online, it can reduce sales overhead as well.
• Access to new markets, such as SME and mid-market customers that increasingly buy only SaaS.

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These benefits are so attractive that every and any product and business model is being re-imagined as SaaS, leading to some great ideas (e.g. Spotify, Coursera, bacon-of-the-month dropped off at your doorstep!). But not every business lends itself intuitively to a SaaS model. Especially if you have years of legacy technology and processes established with an existing customer base, the transition won't happen overnight. There are key questions to answer in each facet of the business.

Yes the PMP exam does have many "trick questions"! ​Here is my cheat sheet of tricks, gotchas and pitfalls collected about these questions. You have to be very careful about the wording and cut through the noise in the question to find what the really important answer is. This is meant to simulate project management in the real-world, where day-to-day you have to cut through the noise and make decisions based on what's truly important. There is also lots of terminology, acronyms and references to names of theories and principles that you need to know, and sometimes these terms are not even in the PMBOK itself. 

Enterprise IT leaders are migrating existing software applications to the cloud. There are benefits to moving to the cloud, but many risks in getting it done right, in a way that doesn't interrupt business operations or introduce regression in functionality. 

Below is a guide for projects managers and product owners for structuring cloud onboarding projects.