Best Practice For Project

Project management best practice reminds us that if we successfully initiate, plan, execute, monitor, control and close out our projects, our metrics will illustrate greater results.

Cutting-Edge Project Management: What Game Theory and Poker Can Teach Us

As Project Management continues to grow around the world and become increasingly commoditised, more specialisation will be necessary in order to secure the best opportunities. One of these areas of specialisation that will have increased demand in the future, I believe, is risk management. World-class competition, lower costs and increased demands for scarce resources are pushing companies to operate in that frontier - the fine line between chaos and efficient use of tools, people and materials. The future operating style of in demand Project Managers will fall somewhere between a conservative money manager and a poker player.

Four Keys to Project Integration Management

Project integration management is all about getting the right resources co-ordinated in an effective and efficient manner. To do this, you must be able to understand and manage the people, resources and technology you use to carry out the project plans. To help you better co-ordinate and manage the various elements of the project, I suggest four keys to integration management.

The Six Principles of Project Management

Right now Project Management Certification is all the rave, but I have been using a similar change model for quite some time with great success. It's called the Six Principles of Service Excellence, and it transitions easily to basically any type of project or initiative you are trying to effectively implement. For the Project Management aficionados and novices out there, think of it as the Six Principles of Project Management.

10 Golden Rules for New Project Managers

Today dozens of new project managers will start their first project, a daunting prospect. Here are my tips for surviving life as a project manager. First, ensure you have a strong business case for your project, with high-level support from your sponsor. The business case is the justification for the project and should list the expected benefits. This is something everyone involved in the project can focus on, and the reason the project is taking place.

Project Management as Sunscreen: How to Avoid Getting Burned

When the summer sun beats down, there's always someone in the family who reminds you to put on your sunscreen. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to easily avoid getting burned at work? There is. It's called Project Management. Grab a bottle of water and put on your baseball cap and think about Project Management as SPF 50 for business. Here's seven ways that Project Management can help you avoid getting burned at work.

5 Goals Every Project Manager Should Aspire to Achieve

Project Managers need to manage every aspect of the projects they oversee, from resources and suppliers to project costs and equipment. The trick to staying on top of everything is to focus on the five most important goals associated with project management. If you can meet the following five goals for each project, you will achieve project and professional success.

Top Three Causes of Project Failure

So much of an organisation's success is tied to project success! Can you think of any significant organisation initiative or improvement that didn't tie to at least one project? I've worked with many organisations, across diverse industries and globally, and I cannot think of a single example. Therefore, what could be more important than figuring out how to ensure project success?

Establishing Project Management Best Practice: Where Do You Start?

What is a best practice? For some clients, discussion has focused around putting policies and procedures in place for accomplishing projects. While other clients think of best practices as a means of ensuring that everyone is using the same terminology and templates and is better trained in project management technical skills. For yet another client, it was important to "get a handle on this project management thing."

10 Principles of Good Project Management

Having managed IT projects for over 10 years, I have relied on the PMBOK as a guide for many of my projects. But experience has taught me to go beyond the manual. Here are 10 principles of project management that are crucial to achieving your goals.
Successful Project Management: Eight Simple Steps to Follow

A failed project can lead to loss of revenue and opportunity; failure to achieve business goals; diversion of resources from other activities; sapping of staff morale and, perhaps, even business failure. So, as projects become more complex and critical to business performance, how do you improve your chances of success? By following these eight practical steps, you can achieve great results for your project.

A Simple Plan for Improved Project Results and Increased Maturity

Many of the clients we work with are a "PMO of one." Usually this person has been brought in to establish common processes and procedures around planning, managing and executing projects. Most often, there is a broad spectrum of project work being performed by varied project teams within the organisation, including a range of maturity levels spanning from no established, repeatable processes to very formalised and documented processes.

Seven Key Principles of Project Management

If you're looking for guidance to help you manage your project with added confidence, then this article will help you. Here I discuss seven key principles, based upon the PRINCE2 project management framework, designed to improve the likelihood of your project succeeding.

Project Management Maturity Model

The very concept of a maturity model remains invisible in many companies. So nothing changes until things go wrong and pain is felt and someone at director level is facing an exposure as a result of a significant project failure. So the simple rationale for having and using a project management maturity model is quite simply that projects fail.

What Mismanaging Small Projects Will Cost You

Okay, so maybe you have the large projects nailed in Microsoft Project, but what about the smaller ones that, in reality, make up the bulk of your portfolio? Are you just "winging" those, using status emails and Excel spreadsheets to manage them? If so, you could be making a great mistake. Small projects, while often overlooked, are still crucial to a company's success. Since they might not involve large sums of money, many companies do not worry as much about them, but all of these small projects can add up to some major costs if managed improperly.

The Seven Essentials of Highly Successful Project Initiations

Seasoned project managers know that successful projects most often start with successful beginnings. In fact, before actual project implementation, the mix of the project, people, tools, and approaches could either spell success... or disaster. Thus, it is important to set and manage the expectations of all project stakeholders because how they will perform their roles and responsibilities, or achieve desired outcomes and other motivational factors depend on what they know about the venture.

Project Management Kick Off Meetings: What is the Point?

I was asked during a meeting with a client what is the point of a project kick off meeting? Apparently, the sponsor (who I was meeting with) was being pressurised by a project manager to hold such a workshop. I suggested that the project manager should be congratulated for the suggestion. I explained that the workshop could be two people meeting for 30 minutes to the whole team going away for the week. I went on to suggest that they were essential for the modern day project where speed seems to be of the essence.

Effective Project Management: Five Laws that Determine Success

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So said Albert Einstein. Yet every year countless projects hit trouble for the same reasons, again and again. Why? Because the fundamental principles that determine project success are not being respected. These principles can be distilled into five laws, realities that always hold true irrespective of the nature or complexity of project.

A Practical Approach to Project Management

What is practical project management? It means keeping project management simple and not getting bogged down in large unwieldy processes. It doesn't mean cutting corners. Good project management practice is still important, it's just about keeping it lean and mean. This with getting the basics right will help you deliver a successful project.

The Three P's of Project Management

This article discusses the three P's of project management, namely people management, process management and performance management. The three P's are broken down and reviewed to provide an understanding of what needs to be addressed for project success. This article also provides information explaining the importance of each and why each element is necessary.

Do You Know Where Your Project Is?

Projects are ultimately about making an organisation stronger and better, and that means it's important to make sure you're choosing the right projects, allocating the right resources, tracking progress along the way, and taking an unflinching look at actual results. Only then will you know the answer to that all-important question: Has the project delivered on its ROI promise?

Avoiding Project Management Pitfalls

Even strong, organised and experienced planners have found themselves managing a project that ends up in chaos, and results in missed deadlines and budget overruns. This article includes common pitfalls project managers experience and tips to make a project more successful.

Project Status Reports Everyone Can Understand

Letting people know how a project is coming along is obviously a key responsibility of any project manager. With so many methodologies to choose from these days, it becomes hard to determine which key pieces of information will be useful to those involved in the project. These methodologies often come with a tangled mass of cryptic terminology, often only recognisable to practitioners of the system, e.g. burn down chart, sprint backlog, concession, story points, etc.

Ten Tips for Running Successful Projects

Why do so many projects fail? Researchers regularly conduct studies to find out the leading causes of project failure. Some of the studies are in the public domain. You can look up studies by such groups as Gartner, Carnegie Mellon University and the Project Management Institute. The studies reveal a recurring theme.

Top Tips for Project Implementation

"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." This quote from Henry Ford was used by a proud dad at a recent wedding I attended. It was a well chosen piece of advice, but as the managing director of a business solutions provider the quote hit a familiar note with me because it sums up exactly what we have been telling our clients during the implementation process.

Execute...Or Be Executed: Avoiding the Project Management Guillotine

Any project manager who has been around the block a few times has experienced a visit to the project management guillotine. Perhaps it was with a sponsor, management, or a customer. The project either had a massive schedule slip, cost overrun, or scope slash (or sometimes all three - now that's a party!) and the project manager was first in line at the guillotine. Some of my most uncomfortable situations in my 20+ years as a professional have involved me getting my head handed to me on a silver platter because I bungled a project.

The 3 P's of PPProject Management

This is an article about Presentation, Planning and Processing; the three cornerstones of project management. Anyone who has ever tried to organise something important seems to either love it or loath it. I remember friends organising trips out for people's birthdays and just not being able to cope with having multiple people to deal with, the planning of train times or car pools and the often continual flood of questions, niggles and other bits and bobs that are important to the person, but overall not so key. Therefore I would like to break project management down into three categories and speak a little about each and what it means for our clients.

How to Deliver Project Status

Status is project management communication, and any channel of communication available to you is a possible delivery method for status. There are two basic kinds of delivery method: presentation and verbal. When you give status in presentation format, you have a reference document that you are reviewing with a group of people. When you give status verbally, you are delivering it without much preparation and without referring to a common document.

How to Report Status on a Project

Your boss has asked you to take the lead on a project in your company. Maybe you are a project manager, or maybe you are not. One thing is certain. Very few people know how to report status on a project, even when they are expert project managers. The basic problem? Most people do not understand the perspective of a manager who is being pressed for information about a big project. Here are some basic rules of reporting status that you can use to further your reputation as someone who knows how to keep management and the project team informed and drive a project to success.

21 Project Management Success Tips

Managing software projects is difficult under the best circumstances. The project manager must balance competing stakeholder interests against the constraints of limited resources and time, ever-changing technologies, and unachievable demands from unreasonable people. Project management is people management, technology management, business management, risk management, and expectation management. It's a juggling act, with too many balls in the air at once.

Let's Make Those Project Meetings More Effective

I was trying to get hold of the project manager. Or rather he was trying to get hold of me. However, I had tried 3 times already so I sent him an email knowing it would sink to the bottom of the pile. I got to thinking that it wasn't just this project manager who always seemed to be in meetings. Several people I have been trying to get hold of always seem to be in back to back meetings. Project Agency has been collecting statistics for several years. Some 1,120 people have completed our questionnaire and one of the questions is quite revealing.

Get Maximum Benefits of Merging Top-down and Bottom-up Project Management

Nowadays, the bottom-up approach to management is becoming more and more popular. More and more, organisations are abandoning the top-down management style. Among them are the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young and many others. Even the world biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, are trying to implement bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments. However, managers are still arguing over which approach is more beneficial for organisations. To understand the reason for the ongoing changes in management processes, we need to compare the two management styles.

Having a Robust Governance Process

So, you are organised, have identified the stakeholders as well as project risks (and you are actively managing both), you have planned the project and you are all ready to deliver. But, have you developed a monitoring and control process for your project - an essential part of project management and work generally?

Technology Vendor Contracting: Breaking the Mould

Commercial buyers of information technology products and services are locked into a self-defeating pattern of behaviour when it comes to negotiating contract terms and conditions with technology vendors, and it is time to move on to a better approach. Better technology vendor negotiations produce better contracts for a technology project, and better contracts produce better project outcomes. So, break the mould and move on to a better way of negotiating contract terms and conditions for your next technology project.

The Purpose of Project Management and Setting Objectives

Project Management has developed in order to plan, co-ordinate and control the complex and diverse activities of modern industrial and commercial projects. All projects share one common characteristic - the projection of ideas and activities into new endeavours.

When Do I Turn on Project Management?

The problem with project management and IT is that all too often, project management is an afterthought on a project. It is often perceived as "project control" or an administrative function that tracks issues and schedule dates based on best guesses. We are lured to "just get it done" and leap into development without adequate planning. With this approach, project management is seen as providing little or no value, which is understandable because it is inherently reactive when applied this way. Inevitably, projects will exceed prescribed time and budget parameters. To be effective, an organisation needs to invest in project management at the very beginning of the project life cycle.

Project Management Basics

If you have ever had responsibility for managing a project, regardless of how little or how big, you will understand the many nuances and special considerations that have to be taken into account behind-the-scenes. Project management success stories rarely show the struggles, problems or weaknesses of the project or team to the public. One author, Herbert Lovelace, likened this to the kitchen, which "...tends to be cleaned up before it is shown to guests!"

Setting Measurable Project Objectives

Examine ten projects at random, and you will see some of the worst written objectives. Project objectives are often hard to track, vague, and lacking in depth. In project objectives, people need details to help know where they are in the process, and data helps them make informed decisions. I like to recommend "DISCO" when forming objectives. "DISCO" can be spelled out to point us in the proper direction for creating project objectives and tracking their progress.

Let Project Management Boost the Bottom-Line

The next time you hear the words "bottom-line" when you're sitting in the audience at a company meeting, don't roll your eyes. Instead, think about all the ways that you as a project manager can help to boost that bottom-line.

Developing a New Project Scorecard

For many firms implementing a new project is not an easy endeavour. This may come with a lot of risk, which is why it is always a good idea to use a new project scorecard. This way, managers have a more accurate idea of what needs to be achieved for a project to become a success.

Real World Project Management: Procurement Management

Projects typically need stuff: servers, software, subject matter experts, pizza, etc. And to buy all this stuff, you need to go through procurement processes. That's just a fancy way of saying you need to follow some rules and procedures within your organisation to get the things you need to complete your project.

A Project Management Primer: Basic Principles - Scope Triangle

The project management Scope Triangle or Quality Triangle shows the trade-offs inherent in any project. The triangle illustrates the relationship between three primary forces in a project. Time is the available time to deliver the project, cost represents the amount of money or resources available and quality represents the fit-to-purpose that the project must achieve to be a success.

Controlling Project Costs Through Interactive Planning

I have observed that successful project leaders have made a paradigm shift in their thinking as compared to the more traditional school of thought I call "thinking in a silo." The silo thinking process waits and holds off the construction management team until the detailed design documents are about to start or, even worse, when the detailed design documents are completed. This is too late in the project's life cycle. At this stage, there is a preliminary estimate and schedule developed.

Step-by-Step Beginners Guide to Project Management

Projects must; actively involve all the group members, have excellent communication and access to project information, have a shared desired outcome, have specific dates for completion of tasks, and have all the required tools (when needed) in order to finish. If there is no enthusiasm in the group, your project is dead or doomed to be incredibly dull and tedious.

7 Steps to Project Success

The successful completion of a big project should bring big benefits for your company - otherwise, why bother? Here is a seven step procedure to manage projects from inception to success. It guarantees the best chance of achieving maximum project benefits. This checklist should also be useful to senior company executives, functional chiefs and project managers alike.

How to Keep a Design Project Moving

It happens all too frequently. Everyone read the Creative Brief and gave their sign-off. The design team was selected because they had the most experience in your industry. The project schedule had plenty of padding built into it. But your web or graphic design project is nowhere close to final and you're a month past the deadline. How does this happen? Following are seven common causes for a design project to get held up, and suggestions to help you meet your deadline.

Tips for Project Management Success

Bringing projects in on time and on budget is always a challenge. With the competing demands for labour and capital, projects have many internal and external forces that can contribute to a derailment. It takes a strong sense of direction, efficiency and leadership to keep the project on track. The following guidelines are some helpful tips that every project manager can use at one time or another.

Project Management As it Ought to Be

Most of us are beyond the point where we believe that successful project management can be accomplished by following a formula or merely using the right system. It's not that the tools are unimportant, or that the systems don't work, because they do. However, the systems and the software only make the job easier; they aren't the elements of success.

Flexible Project Management

In a study by TBC (Tylee-Birdsall & Co) it was determined using the value mapping procedure that most technical design projects could theoretically be completed in half the time if they were managed perfectly and there was no rework required. If we therefore assume that most projects are 50% efficient we can easily bring this up to 80% or even higher if methods to reduce rework and delays were put in place.

People, Process, and Predicting Project Success

Great people, people with sufficient functional skills and domain expertise can trump process, good or bad. Good process, process appropriate for the context, will help those people. But great people can overcome bad process to deliver a good product.

5 Tips for Successful Projects

On a regular basis we are constantly reminded that an overwhelming majority of projects are completed over budget, past the desired deadline and outside the original scope. Best practice project management reminds us that if we successfully initiate, plan, execute and close out our projects - our metrics will illustrate greater results. However, there's more to project management than just a simple methodology. With this in mind, here are five simple tips for completing this challenging process and improving your project outcomes.

Avoiding Project Failure: It's Not Rocket Science

It is true that every project is unique; however the underlying causes of project failure are usually restricted to a few specific areas. Once we know what these are we can take steps to increase the likelihood of success.

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