Risk

By Dr. Shree Nanguneri • April 13th, 2012

Enhancing PMP with Business Process Excellence Part III (Final Part of Series) Viable Lean Six Sigma Solutions to Validate Project Timelines and Increase KPI Linkage for PMP leaders Dr. Shree Nanguneri and Mr. Gustav Toppenberg   Meandering in a World Swayed by Certification: In Part I, we addressed the vitality of the linkage of a [...]

Enhancing PMP with Business Process Excellence Part II (of an III Part Series) Validating Project Timelines against Expected Changes in Customer Requirements Dr. Shree Nanguneri and Mr. Gustav Toppenberg Background for “Changes in Customer Requirement:” In Part I we initiated discussions on how the KPI needs to link with the business goals and objectives.  In [...]

Every day we come face to face with situations and events that can elicit responses of fear, anxiety, and worry. For the most part, we’re more than capable of handling those events, especially when they remind us of past circumstances that we’ve encountered and either overcome or learned from our mistakes (I’ve got many of [...]

This is the second part of a three part article discussing “how does a project manager intelligently handle delays?”

Last article we focused on acknowledging the natural flow of a project which includes periodic speed bumps and roadblocks. In today’s article we’ll focus on using critical path analysis to assist with project management. Diagramming the critical paths of a project accomplishes several things:

This is the second part of a three part article discussing “how does a project manager intelligently handle delays in a project?”

Last article we focused on acknowledging the natual flow of a project which includes periodic speed bumps and roadblocks. In today’s article we’ll focus on using recovery protocol plans to assist with project management.

Did you know Project Management is having a birthday? Well, sort of a birthday. It was 100  years ago, in 1911, that Frederick W. Taylor published Principles of Scientific Management. Early pioneers of project management, such as Henry Gantt, were followers of Dr. Taylor. Now, for historical accuracy, it should be noted that Dartmouth College [...]

We’ve heard saying like “It’s not what you say, but how you say it”; “Actions speak louder than words”; “It’s not what you way, but how you feel when you say it.” After an incident this past week, I totally agree with all of those statements more than ever. Why?

Nope. There’s just no way around it.  You are going to have to work with people. Even if you are a “technical project manager” buried in the bowels of a data center or focused on software projects or on enterprise application integration projects, the key to your success is how you work with people. Your [...]

Last time, I talked about status reporting, which is commonly required but whose power as a multitool is often overlooked. Today I am going to talk about a tool that is frequently overlooked altogether – the contingency management plan. Projects are initiated for a reason – in a business setting, to create something of business [...]

Status reports (or whatever your particular methodological school calls them) are frequently maligned – c.f. “TPS Reports” in the movie Office Space – and misused. They are the weekly report that you just have to grind out for your project or program that shows you have been doing something, that you suspect no one reads [...]

We can study about risk management. We can take classes on steps for risk assessments. We can learn about using probability and impact to prioritize our hazard lists. But it’s experience that streamlines our risk assessment process. With experience we can quickly list only the relevant risks. Its experience that automatically eliminates the low probability and low impact items. The unnecessary items become invisible and therefore free time to focus on the more important items.

We’ve all heard the groan: “We have an aggressive schedule to meet.” The fact is, it’s not the “schedule” timeline that is aggressive; rather, it’s what we choose to fit into it. Adopting an attitude of progress refinement (perfecting over perfection) with the confidence percentage strategy helps reduce this tension between promised and actually delivered tasks.

-Defining and Driving a realistic metrics strategy – The Risks and Benefits of metrics No matter your role in the project organization and whether you are just starting to define your framework and strategy or have a well developed one in place, ensuring that you understand the risks and benefit continuously is paramount to how [...]

- a case for project metrics. The right metric, driving the right behavior aligned with the right strategy. Think of the last project or program you managed, or the portfolio of projects or programs in your PMO. How successful are they? How much value are they generating for the company? How are they performing against [...]

Stage 2 – A dream is just a dream until it’s written down, then it’s a plan! If you’ve done the exercises faithfully so far, by now you should have a pretty clear idea of your family’s fabulous future. Now it’s time to create a plan that will more than double your chances of achieving your [...]

Now that the linkage between the delivery and operations of the service has been established and the PM understands how the service enables a capability, it is time to make the connection between the delivery team and the organization.

I believe that helping the PM understand EA and its links to Business Architecture (BA) will help to crystallize the role that their delivery team plays in the broader scope of the enterprise.

Linking Project Delivery in the early stages to business value can be challenging at best, due to changing strategic goals of the enterprise. Also, understanding the full life cycle of the delivered service, including the total cost of ownership and the end-to-end life-cycle of the service can be a difficult task to assume and communicate.

To continue to add value to the enterprise, I believe that the PM role needs to continue to evolve more in the direction of a strategic business manager, linking the project delivery to business value. Excelling not only at delivering a project to the stakeholder, the PM needs to understand how the service delivered, as a result of the project, accelerates a business capability and helps the enterprise leverage current services in-place, as well as the life-cycle of these services, skills that are immensely important to the enterprise success.

Agile isn’t about producing products faster than other methods. Agile isn’t about working faster than other people. The single most fundamental concept in “agile” is the speed of feedback. There are at least 2 very important sources of feedback that can be leveraged in this way.

When project managing for innovation and change, three important steps are getting great inspiration, having an effective idea generation session, and then moving your ideas forward with prototyping. Consider your personal and organizational prototyping practices: do you prototype across a wide range of levels, from rough to real? Do you prototype both your tangible and intangible concepts, as you might for service design and organizational change? Take a look at the following post to imagine your path this year on what and how to prototype – for yourself or across your company.

Scrappy Project Management Mindset Series – Part 4 of 4. If you’re going to lead projects to success you’ve gotta have a powerful mindset that supports you. This week I’ll share some mindset medicine that will keep you scrappy. – Kimberly My favorite story of total commitment is that of Sir Ernest Shakleton, who led [...]