Eight project management podcasts every project manager should listen to

As a project professional, you can benefit from developing yourself further, getting expert advice and finding out about different projects at any stage of your career. What better way to learn and discover industry expertise than with a podcast? Here we share the top project management podcasts from APM resources that you should listen to if you’re a project manager:

How to be a great project leader
In this episode, we pin down exactly what it means to lead a project and how this role is evolving to reflect the changing nature of projects. Host Emma De Vita, editor of Project journal, asks how a project leader needs to behave to be highly effective, and what mindset you need to thrive in this role.

Gordon MacKay, Project Management Capability Lead at Sellafield; Mike Bourne, Professor of Business Performance, Action, Execution and Implementation at Cranfield School of Management; and Claire Fryer, Director of Behavioural Management and Executive Coach at Costain discuss in-depth what leadership means in practice, giving lots of advice on how you can become a better project leader, particularly during challenging times.

How to manage your time
Whatever your professional and personal goals are, time management plays an important role in how successful you are, and how many of your goals you reach. Time management is a skill you’ll need to work on, improve, and refine continuously throughout your career. Done right, this vital skill will pay you back handsomely, both at work and in your personal life.

This podcast tutorial will teach you how to streamline your tasks, get tips on how to audit what you’re spending time on and ways to optimise your time based on your goals.

How to be a great communicator
Projects of all sizes need a communication strategy. Join host, Mike Hine, who explores communication for project professionals with Ann Pilkington, Co-founder and Director of PR Academy; Tim Lyons, Programme and Project Manager working on large system and infrastructure programmes; and Elizabeth Harrin, who has over 20 years’ experience in leading IT, business change and process improvement projects.

Communication is a vital condition for project success. However well-planned, a project will not run smoothly if stakeholders are left confused and under-informed. With an ever-growing array of comms tools, you have some important decisions to make – you need to ensure the methods are appropriate for the message and the audience.

How to deal with performance management
The mere mention of the words 'performance management' can elicit a shudder. Those words trigger uncomfortable thoughts and memories of sitting in annual reviews, bracing ourselves for criticism. Often, we're just happy to get through them without feeling the sting of negative, hurtful feedback. That desire to avoid being critiqued may suggest we're not that interested in growth. Right? Well, no. We know that career development is essential to retention.

In this podcast from Assemble You on APM Learning, you'll learn why performance management is important, some of the big challenges of performance management, pitfalls to avoid, and some best practices that can help you get the most out of your performance management practices.

How to deliver under pressure (and win an award at the same time)
Meet Benjamin Hooper, Programme and Project Manager at Heathrow Airport, whose project won Overall Project of the Year 2020 at the APM Awards. The project, to create an anti-drone system, embraced innovative ways of thinking for the project team, who were tasked with finding an immediate solution to the drone threat. They only had days to fix the problem, so the pressure was immense and the usual project life cycle was jettisoned for more responsive, collaborative and agile processes.

How to make better use of project data
As with many new digital technologies, terminology surrounding project data analytics can be confusing. However, as we discover in this podcast, the potential of project data analytics is huge – and there are several ways you, as a project professional, can begin to harness the practical benefits today.

So what are some of these benefits? And how can you begin to develop a better project data discipline? Mike Hine spoke to a series of experts from across industry, academia and beyond: Naomi Brookes, Professor of Complex Programme Management; Oliver Cowey, Project Controls Manager; Samir Patel, Head of Data; John McGlynn, Project Delivery Director; and Martin Paver, Chief Executive.

How to thrive in your career as a woman
In this special episode Emma De Vita speaks to three ambitious female project professionals to talk about how to have a thriving career despite the barriers that organisational or team culture still persistently put in the way of individual women – women who might also be contending with bias around race or age. Change needs to happen, so let’s find out how to go about doing it from women who are all flourishing in their careers despite the challenges.

Hear from Debbie Lewis, Portfolio Programme Manager at Fujitsu Services; Anita Phagura, Project Manager with a background in transport and Emma Regulski, Programme Manager at Faithful + Gould.

How to make better project decisions
Emma De Vita meets Dr Natalie Marguet, Senior Lecturer in leadership and organisational development at Liverpool John Moores University, and author of APM’s research paper Detect, Reflect and Adapt: Factors influencing critical project decisions. She shares the latest research into how project professionals can improve their decision-making. Get practical advice on how you can become more effective in your work using simple techniques, as well as helping you to understand your personal decision-making style, how to adopt new styles and when to use them.

Bad decision-making on projects has been identified as one of the key reasons for poor project performance, so every project manager has room for improvement and can learn from this new research.

Podcasts featured in this article are available for free with the APM Podcast, or exclusively for APM Members at APM Learning in the podcast library.

You may also be interested in: