Monitor & Control

By John Burke • August 25th, 2008

It’s a funny thing how life continues again and again to give us pause for thought.
In industry, we know that the unemployment rate is going up. The valley seems to be weathering the storm and the financial press is full of speculation that there will be more jobs created next year: me?: Personally after the [...]

I’m studying for the PMP exam, and I’m using the PMPrepcast to study. I actually found one point to disagree with Cornelius Fitchner on today! (That doesn’t usually happen!)
In the Scope Control podcast, he talks about the “updates to the scope baseline” as being redundant, since the process also produces updates to all 3 [...]

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 [...]

Back in the very old days (early 80’s), I was on a team (of 24, I think) that delivered a successful software system on time, on budget, and with every feature the customer had requested.  The schedule had been tight, 18 months from inception to use, as I recall. 
This happened right in the middle of [...]

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, [...]

What is a Project Charter?
The project charter, sometimes also called a Project Overview Statement (POS), is the signed document that formally defines and authorizes a project. Reaching an agreement on the nature of a new project, including its scope, objectives, and constraints can be a difficult but healthy process for a group of key stakeholders [...]

Most project managers find that they when they complete the planning of a project they become inundated in the following execution phase. This is primarily because of the need for overall project coordination, routine schedule management, integrated change control, and project status tracking. In most cases, there is more work than can be accomplished by [...]

Who says the PMO is only responsible for communicating project status reports or headlines when projects are in trouble?  Did you ever consider the opportunities for an Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) who coordinates and communicates business plan information across your organization?   How about informing staff on ALL business plan activities, so everyone has a [...]

If you have not read Shampa’s post below I encourage all of you to read it.  I would like to point out a few newish developments on the software side.  First of all my information on outsourcing prices is from about two years ago.  As most of you know the dollar has taken a significant [...]

Perhaps a few of you will frown upon this entry. It is not academic or pedagogical but I think project management should apply to all aspects of life. I recently returned from a trip to India my home country. And like many Indians and a lot of Silicon Valley VCs, I feel that I should [...]

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 [...]

I’ve spoken to countless Program Managers, VPs, and Directors involved in selecting PPM software. The vast majority of them have some key drivers in mind, but not much in the way of requirements. They know they have to prioritize projects, manage resources and/or judge ROI more effectively. But beyond that — [...]

Between my blog and my role at gantthead, I probably get two or three meeting requests a week from Project Management tool vendors. The general trends these days (or at least what they punch in demos) seem to be toward:

Software as a Service (making implementation easy and quick)
Portfolio Views and Back End Data Mining Capabilities
General [...]

Today I was trying to think of ways to integrate some of the methods and benefits of Critical Chain project management into the traditional PM methodology most companies use. I wanted to pick out one element of CC that would potentially yield the most benefit without much, if any, additional overhead to the project manager. [...]

I recently read a new book by Curt Finch, CEO of Journyx, Inc. titled “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy – Valuing Time as a Business Resource.” I have always been a student of time management, so I was delighted with the opportunity to interview Curt about the book. Please enjoy the interview below.

The applause was thundering as the magician completed his performance. Proman A. Jecgert had hired the magician to help celebrate the completion of what would come to be called Phase One. The party included all participants across the organization. The grove in the trees was a perfect setting, and the sun shone [...]

 
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 [...]

Recently I looked at my calendar and caught myself saying “Sweeeet only 4 hours of meetings today”.  That’s when I realized “I’m in meeting hell”. I had always suspected this, so

Technorati Tags: meetings, Program-Management, project-management, Time management

Have you ever been the program manager on a job where you planned everything down to the smallest detail; you collected the requirements, got your experts together, reviewed what it would take to perform the development, and finally presented your plan to upper management.  They were so impressed with your presentation that

Technorati Tags: portfolio-management, [...]