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Schedule Development Tips… Keep project schedules simple Tasks names to be based on deliverables Tasks names to be descriptive nouns and begin with verbs Do not put check lists into schedule. Use note feature for including details Require project schedules to follow principles of “Dynamic Schedules” All individual tasks have dependencies (predecessors and successors) Chose […]

The Project Meeting Kick-Off: Preparing for your project kick-off meeting can help set your project on the right track. Being organized, establishing roles and responsibilities and laying out the project objectives will go a long way in positioning your project for success. Here are a few tips for planning your project kick-off meeting: Prepare and send […]

Learn Project Risk Management From The Best Almost all projects come with a certain degree of risk, complexity, and uncertainty. However, despite these hurdles, businesses must undertake most projects to grow and develop further. This puts a huge burden on project managers, who are required to mitigate these risks to ensure the best outcomes. Luckily, […]

  A few tips for managing your issues… Maintaining an Issue Log: Assign owners to issues who can resolve the problem. Establish issue priority – Low, Medium, High. Who should work on what issue first? Track issue reported date and estimate target date for resolution. Communicate status to sponsor and key stakeholders in a timely […]

Your Ally: The Project Sponsor Managing your relationship with your project sponsor is key to your success with managing your project. A strong, active sponsor can make a positive difference for the program or project. A project sponsor who may be funding the effort can be the “big stick” when you need someone with authority […]

Working with people will be a challenge that requires careful planning. As a Program or Project Manager your “people” skills will be tested to build an effective project team willing to work together to achieve one goal – project success. Project team members will have their egos and character quirks. You will need to be […]

Be an Effective Project Team Leader During a recent project I really appreciated the importance of being an effective leader to guide a project team. The project that I recently took over was a mess. It did not have a plan and there was a lack of an effective leader on the project team. You could sense the team […]

Progress continues to be made to right a troubled project I recently took over. A project schedule has been established and the team is better organized as a result.  In addition we restructured our project management approach by: Establishing daily “War Rooms”. These are extended daily meetings for our technical teams to troubleshoot stubborn issues/defects. […]

A few weeks ago I was asked to take over a project from another project manager. The project was troubled and the key stakeholders were incredibly frustrated. There was no solid plan in place. The execution activities were initiated and there are problems with the product that has frustrations boiling over. I knew the first […]

            Project scope management encompasses the processes leveraged to define, document, and control the work efforts and outputs of the project and set clear boundaries to document and facilitate an understanding of what is included and what is not in the project. There are five processes involved in project scope management, as described below (Schwalbe, […]