Planning

By Nathalie Udo • December 28th, 2009

This is the very last week of 2009. Can you believe it? This year has gone by faster than any others. It was a year of extremes: extreme lows and extreme highs. Too many people lost their jobs, their houses, their loved ones or their spirit this year.  Every great project manager knows the value [...]

How a team feels impacts its productivity and business results.  Imagine if the acrobat above was having a bad day… the results would be disastrous!
A key ingredient that shapes team effectiveness is its culture and having a sense of community.
Geography plays a huge role in shaping culture. Communities that live together use a common language, [...]

Two of the keynote speakers at the PMI Risk Symposium provided insights into how different risks change in priority over a product lifecycle (Esteri Hinman) and how effective risk management encourages poor risk management (Payson Hall).
Risks change over a product lifecycle
Esteri Hinman PMP (from Intel) presented that there are different functional groups involved over [...]

The approach to Risk Management can also be used for Opportunity Management by using a different point of view.

Another highlight (IMHO) of the Risk Symposium was Eldon F. Jones’ presentation on “Risk Register – What is it and How is it used?”
What is a Risk Register?
A Risk Register is a document that lists “all identified risks, including description, cause, probability of occurring, impact(s) on objectives, proposed responses, owners, and current status” per Mr. [...]

Project Conference 2009 continues through this week in Phoenix, AZ.  As Microsoft prepares for the release of Project 2010, it’s a good time to reflect on some additional best practices that project managers should keep in mind when using their current version of Microsoft Project.
Know the Limitations of Critical Path Methodology – CPM was developed [...]

With the kick-off of Project Conference 2009 in Phoenix, AZ this week Microsoft has invited some customers and partners to get a sneak peek at Microsoft Project 2010.  I have been managing projects and teaching classes on this tool for quite a long time and have had a chance to read about some of the [...]

Have you thought about the environment in your projects? Yes, even if you have NO wind turbines, solar cells, or cars that run on used french-fry oil in your project. Have you? Well, consider this posting as a start.

In my first post about Project Management and Knowledge Management I spoke about Collaboration, in this second post I will talk about after-action reviews.
After-action review also known as a project snap-shot, lessons learned, or any number of other names is an important Knowledge Management activity to complete at the end of a project. They don’t [...]

I’d like to start things off in this posting with a joke I heard on the US Television show, Two and a Half Men. Now keep in mind that the show is full of gratuitous innuendo and juvenile comedy, much of it not easily translatable in (nor suitable for) the context of project management.  In [...]

Taking advantage of the social networks that we PMs have started to form on LinkedIn, I did some polling in early 2009 to gauge the interest level (see post below) in the brand-spanking-new PMBOK(R) Guide.
Using a completely non-scientific scale that I made up in 17.4 seconds, and asking the question on the larger LinkedIn Groups [...]

Every program manager has run into the same situation at some point in their career. You put together your program plan with lots of spreadsheets, Gantt charts, requirements documents, resource requirements, risk management plan, etc. You present the plan to management and everything goes reasonably well until you start to talk about risks and how [...]

Have you ever worked for someone who said ALL requirements are high priority ? Yeah ! We all have. Customers often are insistent upon the delivery of a certain feature set by a certain timeline that may seem impossible to meet. If everything is high priority, nothing is !

Project teams often bear of the brunt of this indecisiveness. Impossible targets, lack [...]

Once again as an Incognito Project Manager, here are some observations on the Power of being Proactive…
 
Prior to my coming onto the team, our project manager had been hard at work preparing the way for our initiative.  Many hours strategizing plus preparing and presenting the business case clearly made all the difference for our success.  [...]

Administrative controls are perhaps most important, because they most directly impact your people. On the one hand, they are the simplest, since all it takes is education. On the other hand, education about the hazards of smoking or the possibility that having sex causes pregnancy hasn’t done much to change behaviors in those realms. Well, rather than throw up our hands and give up, let’s tackle administrative controls anyhow…

When teaching “InfoSec 101,” I reflect back on my early career as a reporter, and focus on answering the standard questions: who, what, why, where, when, and how. Since this is a Scrappy Book, let’s throw caution to the wind and take them out of order…

There is a set of SW practices that I consider non-negotiable, and they begin with 2 that are requirements-related:
1. Written, reviewed, approved requirements
2. A requirements baseline, implemented with a requirements management (RM) tool
In my last company, getting these done in a way that was accepted by engineers and management alike did require a pinch of “writing the [...]

Sitting through a debate session at the European Commission’s conference on creativity and innovation, I wondered how this very conservative and structured assembly would harness creative ideas. Glancing at the serious faces surrounding me, I wondered if I had arrived at the right event. One of the panel speakers must have read my mind as [...]

Despite all of the doom and gloom of the global economy, there is still a ray of light that reminds us of the possibilities ahead. See this moment as an opportunity to create and innovate across cultures. Yes, we still need to manage our projects and organizations with thrift and efficiency. However, that’s not going [...]

So, you’ve met your stakeholders and gotten their support. Everyone agrees on the size of the breadbox. Details are needed, but those will be identified during requirements gathering. How do you plan to pursue the project? Should you draft a plan on your own since your team is brand new and they don’t know any [...]

As we discussed yesterday, there are many project decelerators, among them lack of stakeholder support. Whether the stakeholders support your project or not, if they are important to your project, you must secure their support. How do you do that?
First, you must identify who your stakeholders are. Just because they are important in the organization [...]