Project Management Podcast | Technical University of Berlin

Not only since ‘Fridays for Future’ has sustainability become a major concern – but is this something, which needs to be considered in project management? Do we need to cover aspects of sustainability when teaching project management? Christian has some relevant insights here, which he also has translated to his very successful course in project management for engineering students.

Project success is certainly not always given - some projects prove to become major disasters. Hans Georg Gemünden explains the challenges of the new Berlin Airport project and how this reflects on the 'mother organization'. His insights are rooted in an analysis of annual reports of different airport holding companies.

Strategy projects as a specific type of projects - interacting with the customer is crucial in order to cope with the uncertainties inherent in projects, where the ultimate project result is unclear. Henrik, a very experienced senior strategy consultant, offers insights based on numerous corporate growth projects.

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Visualization has become an important topic in supporting project management. As more and more data with relevance to project management becomes available "at your fingertips", visualization has emerged as an approach to make sense of data in the project or portfolio decision – but how? Here Cathy has some interesting insights.

Agile project management intends to speed up project execution and increase quality of the result. How communication and information management, focus on teams, defining clear roles and splitting up the overall task into smaller sub-tasks becomes essential. Hear Leroy explaining the main issues of agile project management along some interesting actual projects he is involved in.

When market expansion to Sweden is on the agenda, then project management, tasked with executing this strategy, needs to consider many different and sometimes surprising issues. Oliver takes us on a journey to conquer Sweden highlighting the importance of diverse teams, thorough analysis, and what makes a successful project office.

Managing the project of establishing a wind farm is all about risks. Coping with weather, environmental issues, health and safety all determine profitability of such a project. This podcast features Torsten Garmatz, a project manager of Van Oord with extensive experience in managing such risks and securing competitive projects.

WW2 bombs and sea mines surprisingly pose a major risk in building off-shore windfarms. Learn about how to deal with such risks in project management and hear about a structured approach to tackle this pressing issue.

Eric and I talk about the differences between agile and more classical project management approaches and why it may make sense to relax a little bit, when it comes to the being dogmatic about the project management approach. Which approach is best, is not a question of dogma but an issue of pragmatic and sound evaluation of the given project and organizational situation. Learn from Eric’s insights rooted in many years of successfully helping firms improving their project management.

This podcast is about the complexities of interface management in a large project. Interfaces and communication across those organizational barriers are a major issue in all projects. Being able to identify relevant interfaces, recognizing the most important challenges, and addressing those, just make successful project management. Carsten reports on a project, which has dealt with tremendous interface problems.

This podcast is about a recent research project on project management in so called expert organizations - in this case hospitals. These organizations are characterized by project members, which have very specific domain knowledge and strong professional identities. The question is, how classical project management approaches work in this type of organizations, when top management interference may become critical, and how professionalizing project management impacts the size of the project portfolio.