By Tom Kellen

Once you've completed a course from PDUs2Go.com, your next step is to register those PDUs with the Project Management Institute (PMI) so you get credit for them.  PMI's registration system can sometimes look a bit like a maze and can be somewhat confusing to navigate, so we've come up with a step-by-step guide on exactly how to register your PDUs with PMI.

You can find an article with complete instructions on our Blog at http://blog.pdus2go.com/2009/11/15/how-to-register-your-pdus-from-pdus2go-com-with-pmi/ or you can download a PDF of these instructions at http://blog.pdus2go.com/?KVLc73ys

By Tom Kellen

It is very easy to get so caught up in your current project that you don't take time to relax a bit and keep up with what's going on in your industry.  Remember to take a half an hour or so a week just to browse some of your favorite project management sites just to keep up to date on what's new and exciting in your industry. 

By Tom Kellen

Some times as project managers it’s so easy to get caught up in Gantt and PERT charts that it’s easy to forget the beauty of a good ToDo list.  One example of a good, on-line ToDo list is the free ToDo.ly (http://todo.ly) service.

With ToDo.ly you create a project with a click of a button and then can start adding tasks to the project.  The simple interface allows you to drag and drop items to reorder them and you can create sub-tasks just by dropping one task on another.

By Tom Kellen

Have you ever had one of these kinds of days?  You need to meet with Joe, so you pick up the phone and call his office, but he’s not in yet so you leave him a message.  Joe calls back right when you are in the middle of your weekly team meeting and leaves you a message.  Thus beginnith the new “meeting message ping pong game”.  It’s time to opt out of that game and make your life a bit easer.  Enter, Tungle.me.

Tungle is an on-line scheduling service that also runs on multiple platforms and really makes scheduling those meetings a breeze. As it says on Tungle’s web site:

By Tom Kellen

Happy 2010 to one and all!  Since this year’s focus for the PDUs2Go “Special Editions” is “INNOVATION to IMPLEMENTATION” I thought I would mention a couple of web sites I look to for information on Innovation.

As you can probably tell, I am a total geek, and as such I love my techie toys.  One site that I keep an eye on to see what new things are coming down the technology pipeline is Engadget.  Here you will find the latest scoop on everything from cell phones & laptops to high definition TV.  While you may or may not find something directly on this site that will help you with managing your projects, I do believe that checking in sometimes and looking at how others are innovating can spark ideas for you.

By Tom Kellen

PDUs2Go is starting to offer more and more video to accompany the audio in some of our courses.  Because there is not really a cross platform standard for video I thought a couple of tips might be of help.

The videos from PDUs2Go.com are in MP4 format, which is an international standard file format.  Now once you’ve downloaded one of these MP4 files your first question will probably be “How do I watch it?”

For those of you with a Macintosh, support is built into the system and all you have to do is double click on the file and it will open in iTunes for you to watch.

Unfortunately Windows does not have native support for MP4 video.  If you have installed iTunes and QuickTime for Windows, then you’re all set and can just double click the file to watch it.  The way to add in support for many more audio and video formats is to install QuickTime for Windows.  You can download QuickTime directly from Apple’s site here.

Another solution if you don’t want to install QuickTime is to use the cross-platform open-source multimedia player, VLC.  The VLC player will run on Windows, Mac OS X, many versions of Linux and a bunch of other operating systems, and best of all, it’s FREE.  You can download VLC from VideoLAN’s website.  This is a handy tool to have in any Project Manager’s toolkit so I encourage you to make a small donation if you find it of use.

Keep your eyes on PDUs2Go.com as we are planning lots of new and exciting content coming in the New Year.

By Tom Kellen

One important aspect of project management is meetings and appointments.  As I usually have several projects going at once, I need all the help I can get with remembering where and when I’m supposed to be somewhere.

One of the best tools I found to help with this problem is Google Calendars (GC).  Google Calendars has several different ways to remind you, all of which I find useful.

When you create an event in GC you can edit the event details and there you will find the reminder section.  The first way that GC can remind you is by sending you an e-mail message.  I typically have it send me an e-mail 2 hours before an appointment.

By Tom Kellen

A month or so ago I wrote about some tricks for making easy to remember, but hard to guess passwords.  The reality of today’s technical age is that we have to access WAAAY to many sites to easily remember passwords for if you are really using different passwords for different sites.

The best way to over come this obstacle is to use a “password management” program.  These programs remember your usernames and passwords for you.  They store the password in an encrypted file secured by, you guessed it, a password.  The great thing is that you really only need to remember the one password that secures the program since it is remembering all of your other passwords.

By Tom Kellen

Have you ever been on one of those projects with some colleagues who just can't seem to remember deadlines? Me too, and I've just found a site that just may help, LetterMeLater.com.

Let's say I'm working on this project where I've got 18 people who are supposed to get me something every month on the 1st of the month, but many of them just can't seem to remember to get it to me on time.  Now I could spend hours writing e-mails reminding, reminding and reminding, or I can use LetterMeLater.com.  With LetterMeLater, I can spend just a few minutes setting up a reminder e-mail, address it to the whole team, and then tell LetterMeLater when to send the messages.

I can set up recurring e-mails that go out just before the due date for the entire year!  With just a few minutes on LetterMeLater, I'm done with my reminders for the year.  You can use dates like, tomorrow, two weeks from now, etc.  You can even use attachments, html for rich content, everything you need to keep your team up to date!

Take a quick trip over to LetterMeLater.com and check it out.  Maybe it will take one chore off  your check list.

By Tom Kellen

Sometimes when my projects start to get overwhelming, I try to go by that sage advice on how to eat an elephant; “One bite at a time.”  When I get to this point, I narrow my focus on what the tasks are that I have to do “today”.