Metrics

By asarkar • March 13th, 2010

This is the 3rd of the three articles that discuss about strategies for new project managers to function effectively. The three steps are; understanding top ten reasons of a project failure and how to proactively plan to avoid them, how to have a solid communication plan and how to manage changes. The 3rd article covers the importance of impact analysis and how to manage changes.

This is the 2nd of the three articles that discuss about strategies for new project managers to function effectively. The three steps are; understanding top ten reasons of a project failure and how to proactively plan to avoid them, how to have a solid communication plan and how to manage changes. The 2nd article covers the importance of communication and how to create project communicationmanagement plan.

Know any control-freaks?

For many of them, control is an illusion. Paradoxically, by grasping for more control, they often get less.

Jim Sloane is a particularly adept person to provide an executive primer on organizational project management maturity.  There are a multitude of models and approaches for measuring organization maturity and the associated business benefits.  With the increasing number of tools and models available to organizations, it can be challenging to choose the best [...]

Probably everyone accepts that a business rarely has the same priorities during an extended period when performance objectives apply, whether it’s 6 months, 12 months, or some other duration, right? Unless you’re in a very long-established business (and even then, departmental priorities can change focus over such durations), it’s likely that what priorities you understood [...]

The programming press and IT journals are full of stories about the failure of software outsourcing. The statistics are sobering. Less than 50% of outsourcing meets financial objectives. The outsourcing of many business processes besides software development also has the same less-than-stellar results.
Forrester reports the top three causes of outsourcing failure are:

Technorati Tags: Global-teams, Metrics, [...]

Wow, I guess they’ve got a for dummies book on everything now.  Awesome.  There is also of course the 10 minute project manager book in case you find yourself dubbed project manager 10 minutes before the kick off meeting. 

Technorati Tags: Books, Brain, building-executive-support, career-path, career-planning, communication, Crisis-Management, dysfuncitonal-corporate-culture, engineering-management, Getting-Things-Done, learned-helplessness, Project-success, traditional-project-managment

Having made a moniker name called theUnknownPM kinda makes it impossible for me to push my own products so instead let me do the next worst thing for a moment and engage in random philosphy.  How do you know if you are a success or a failure at what you are doing?  Are you a [...]

 
OK here is the scenario – Do you pass the “ink blot test”??.
It is Friday afternoon on the day before a holiday weekend. You are on the telephone to a venture capital company in New York wanting to know about RoHS impact. The project you are working on since October and which has had three [...]

During an intermission of Andrea Bocelli’s concert tonight, I was comparing his concert tour project manager job to my own high tech project execution. How much difference, how big of a headache would it be and would I want to do it, I asked myself.

Technorati Tags: cross-functional-teams, customer-centric, Program-Management

. . . well, kind of . . .
Holy guacamole! Two weeks ago I had a ridiculous notion creep stealthily into my noggin’ . . . and, as is my habit, I set yet another seemingly impossible goal (one of my bad habits!) . . . to have my book be MORE popular than [...]

Unusual title I know – Saturday at last (and my last blog here)
I just spent the day shooting clays – my score is getting better every time I get out on the range and practice. One day I may actually be able to hit all of them – who knows.
The reason for the comparison is [...]

A fast overview of the things you need to check from a project management perspective.
(Friday …… at last…………..)
This week we have looked at a number of areas.
The first is that of the environmental compliance actions arising out of the MRD (Marketing Requirements Doc).
Everything related to environmental compliance hinges on this document and the geographic areas into [...]

A project manager’s guide to reliability aspects of lead free electronics implementation.
I trust that you are not part of a team that expected to just change the solder from leaded to unleaded and call it good.
If you are part of that team I suggest you start getting the resume up to speed and start browsing [...]

How the EU RoHS legislation turned engineers into lawyers: :
From a Project Management perspective it can sometimes be a little frustrating when there are delays due to the BOM verification on an electronics project: particularly when the environmental compliance aspect did not used to be a check list item: …
Just a few years [...]

   Continuing on thoughts around maturity and the evolution of project management…the PMI-Silicon Valley Chapter is hosting their 10th Anniversary Dinner next month, and joining the festivities will be Stanford Advanced Project Management’s Dr Christopher Meyer to share his insight on how the future of project management will play a role in delivering a good customer experience.  Chapter President Harish Chinai and I recently had a conversation on [...]

Welcome back to blog # 5 in the series. Today, for project management, we are going to look at a very specific case of an on-campus project and how I managed it into an A+. Of course, I had a vision, a mission and purpose, goals, plans and pilot programs and I had [...]

PROJECT MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES
TO AVOID CAREER LIMITING MOVES – PART 3 of 3
Jeff Schlageter
President, Project Acceleration
Jeff@ProjectAcceleration.com
Wouldn’t it be great to have a list of project management “best practices” that would help you benefit from the experiences of hundreds of other program managers? In a way, these best practices would be like having your own project [...]

Ignoring the needs of real customers is just the start. When most project teams hear the shot of the starting gun, they leap into figuring out HOW to do the project – before they clearly understand WHAT the project is intended to accomplish, and what is expected of them. When goals are fuzzy, instead [...]

Attribute Results to Processes
This may be the most controversial point, but in my opinion it is aligned with the rest of Deming’s philosophy nicely, and I agree with this point totally. In the US especially, Management By Objectives (MBO) is very much the status quo. I’ll give a short explanation of my opinion [...]

Do you recognize that your current project is late, but you haven’t taken steps necessary to rescue it, except for saying “we’ll work harder to bring it back on schedule?” If you admit that you should do more to handle your project lateness, then the next question is what steps you should take? Actually, the [...]