Planning

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 [...]

In my last blog I mentioned that I recently received a job offer at a new company.  This started me thinking about what is my plan for getting started at the new job, so today I figured I’d share my thoughts and maybe it will help you or maybe you’ll have some feedback for me.

Technorati [...]

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 [...]

By Frank Mangini
Project management and risk management are two sides of the same coin. Projects cannot exist without risk. Project managers must understand risks and how to describe risk before they can hope to manage risks. We should all agree what a risk is, how to state a risk and how a risk [...]

If you are like most project managers, you wish you had a better real-time handle on the progress of your project so you could predict when you will finish or when a change is needed in order to stay on track. I have used a simple yet powerful method that is applicable to most projects [...]

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 [...]

 
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 [...]

Just as there are many ways to manage a project, there are many ways to cook a turkey.
We all have our favorite way to do it:  Oven-baked, Bar-B-Cued, Deep fried, or even Outsourced.  And we choose the best technique using various success criteria:
-          Results
-          Taste
-          Moisture content
-          Effort
-          Expense
-          Convenience
-          Novelty
-          Familiarity
All these factors impact what [...]

So you need to put together a schedule, but are having trouble getting estimates from your team?  Believe it or not, that’s good news! 
Well, not great news: great news would be quick, accurate estimates, honed by years of experience and factoring in a reasonable amount of risk. 
But it’s not bad news, either.  Bad news [...]

Most of us know that risk comes inherent with a project because projects involve unknowns. What I find in my project management travels is that many project managers don’t understand the difference between a risk and a problem. Why is this important?

Technorati Tags: Planning, project-management, Risk

“The concept of teamwork often gets turned into some fluffy, warm and fuzzy ‘thing’ that no one quite knows what to do with … a bunch of people working together in unadulterated harmony or even outright bliss. Great if you can get it but not something I’ve seen a huge amount of….”

Common sense says that when working on a project with results that really matter, one should agree on a plan of how to achieve the goals, consider what might go wrong, and make sure everyone who needs to deliver results is committed to doing what needs to be done to make it happen. However, here’s [...]

Everyone wants to be a leader, but observe how leaders are increasing questioned, their professionalism challenged, and reputation ruined! Take one Olympic swimmer and place them in mud. This obsession with the belief the LEADER IS ABLE TO LEAD causes most project nightmares. It is the MUD of bureaucratic thinking [...]

When I ask project management students to list actions that are key to successful projects, the overwhelming majority of things on the list are related to planning.
We actually spend most of the time and energy in execution and control rather than planning. So, what’s going on? I think the students’ lists reflect frustrations – struggling [...]

Creating a project office may be the “in thing” to do.  It is also fraught with perils.  A goal may be to implement a project office as a vehicle for organizational change.  The first step, then, is to discover the processes necessary to lead organizational change and create the conditions that will enable change.  This [...]

Recently I realized that I have become a little cynical about project management. Maybe I’m just negative, and most projects really are smoothly running systems, with disaster showing it’s ugly face only very ocassionally. Perhaps my attitude is a consequence of my consulting in the area of product development project management (my dad [...]

I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but something I’ve noticed about the human condition that retards our ability to be successful project managers. When we see someone else fail we can easily assume that it’s because they’re stupid, but when we ourselves fail it’s an honest mistake or just bad luck. “They” [...]

Common sense says that, when working on a project where results really matter, the team should agree on a plan of how to achieve the goals, consider what might go wrong, and make sure everyone who needs to deliver results is committed to doing what needs to be done to make it happen. Here’s [...]

Taking risks seems to be an endangered species in corporate America. But that shouldn’t stop the fearless project leader.
Following are three tips to help you rise to the occasion when all hell is breaking loose.
1. Assure that the team has overturned every stone in the planning phase. This means explicitly including risk and uncertainty into [...]