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5 Steps to Attaining Project Control
Whoda thunkit? 5 Simple Steps to controlling your project:
1. Define what will be measured and/or tested and how often.
2. Monitor progress and evaluate deviations from the plan.
3. Report progress.
4. Analyze the report.
5. Take action where necessary.
Not rocket science at all. The only problem is that people just don't do it. So, do it.
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- Define what will be measured and/or tested and how often. This should incorporate business requirements, cost constraints, technical specifications, and deadlines, along with a preliminary schedule for monitoring that includes who is responsible for it.
- Monitor progress and evaluate deviations from the plan. During each reporting period, two kinds of information are collected: (1) Actual project data, which include time, budget, and resources used, along with completion status of current tasks. (2) Unanticipated changes, which include changes to budget, schedule, or scope that are not results of project performance. For example, heavy rain may delay the completion of a housing project. Earned value analysis, described later in this chapter, is a useful method for evaluating cost and schedule deviations.
- Report progress. Keep reports succinct and timely. Do not delay a report until after a problem is “fixed” to make the report look better. Likewise, avoid lengthy reports that delay the dissemination of important information to others in the organization.
- Analyze the report. Look for trends in the data. Avoid trying to “fix” every deviation. If there is no trend to the deviation, it likely does not require corrective action at this time.
- Take action where necessary. This includes updating the project plan and notifying any stakeholders who are affected by the changes. If the changes are big enough, they will require stakeholder approval in advance.
Five Phases of Project Management (humorous)
THE FIVE PHASES OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT
1. Initial enthusiasm
2. Inevitable problems
3. Search for someone to blame
4. Punishment of those who are innocent
5. Praise and reward for the non-participants
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- Initial enthusiasm
- Inevitable problems
- Search for someone to blame
- Punishment of those who are innocent
- Praise and reward for the non-participants
THE FIVE PHASES OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Project Management: 8 Steps to On-Time, On-Budget Delivery
Businesses embark on thousands of projects every year. Unfortunately, most projects are doomed to fail because the original success criteria were not met. The bottom line is that businesses talks a good game but they are not ready or willing to make the real investments necessary to deliver on time, on budget, and with high quality near 100 percent of the time. There are eight steps that, if followed as a single unit provide the roadmap to project management perfection.
In tight times, IT managers more likely to postpone than cancel a project
A common concept in fundamental macroeconomics -- the capital projects are still out there. The needs for infrastructure are still there. We're just going to wait until the market shows us that it's a good time to actually move forward with it.
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We were surprised to find that IT managers find that postponement is better than canceling projects,
ERP Projects, while affordable, are plagued by scope and project mgmt issues
Surprise! Over-ambitious targets and poor project management, the bane of software development everywhere, haunt small to mid-sized companies in their search for business improvement, creating horror stories, which, some experts say, unfairly damage the credibility of the systems that should be their salvation.
Three Little Words Every Leader Needs to Learn
I thought it was WTF at first. Such as being inquisitive and demanding. "WTF were you thinking when you did that?" "WTF has happened to sales this quarter? Johnson! You're head of that! Tell me!" and so on.
But, I was wrong. It's something else.
Top 25 Project Management Blogs
Some great reading - The 25 Top Project Management Blogs
Five mistakes managers make most often
Some of the most common management mistakes -
1. Not communicating with the team. - Almost always a problem.
2. Continually focusing on the negative.
3. Changing policy due to one person. - This is a BIGGIE.
4. Not understanding the needs and concerns of your team.
5. Never admitting you’re wrong or never taking responsibility.
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Add Sticky Notedon’t take across-the-board measures to correct it just because you’re afraid of confronting that one team member
- I don't know HOW many times I see otherwise capable leaders trying to make process changes to correct a single person's statistically anomalous behavior problem. Words of absolute wisdom. - on 2009-05-15
What's the magic project size to require PM oversight/overhead?
It’s common to hear the all-purpose methodology nullifier from the client or salesperson, “But this is a small project!” The inside project manager hears this phrase when he tries to convince the project sponsor that a project plan, a materials list, and a written scope are necessary. The external IT service provider hears it from the salesperson when she tells him that the new engagement he’s selling should include an additional 15% estimate for project manager duties.
Project Management: Project Success vs. Fear of Leading
It takes more than management skills to lead an IT project to a successful conclusion. In fact, it takes courage -- plus the ability to influence others and a temperament that doesn't permit the option of giving up when the going gets tough. Project management without project leadership is likely to result in project failure.
Keep the three management roles in an IT project separate
Every IT effort requires that the service provider play three distinct roles: project manager, technical manager, and relationship manager. While many independent project managers and consultants attempt to play all three roles, they do so at the risk to themselves, the project, and the relationship.
Five clues that your project is headed for trouble
In these difficult times, lots of projects are getting canceled, postponed or mothballed. Although these are perfectly normal occurrences in IT, they seem more frequent, swift and stinging now. When a project is killed, we like to think that its fate is entirely due to external forces -- the swirling, uncontrollable winds of the economic hurricane happening outside. It's not that we're doing anything wrong, we reason; it's just a response to the crisis.
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Add Sticky NoteThey were judged unlikely to ever be completed. Or they were expected to exceed time or budget constraints, or to fail to offer sufficient business value even if they did deliver a product.
- Or the politics behind the project overtook the value, and the sponsor decided to avoid the hailstorm and simply take a loss on sunk costs rather than risk further hazard of public humiliation or derision. - on 2009-05-13
Cause and Effect Diagram
How to create and use a Cause and Effect Diagram to perform root cause analysis or whatever else you had in mind. Few quality-related issues are easily resolved. More frequently, various causes intermix in unique and complicated ways to produce the final negative impact upon quality that you hope to fix. Using a cause-and-effect diagram allows you to get a grasp on these contributing factors.
A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile
Very nice white paper on Agile PM - When software development project teams move to methodologies, they often leave project managers behind. Traditionally trained project managers are confused as to what their new roles and responsibilities should be in an environment that no longer needs them to make stand-alone decisions. This paper focuses on re-defining the job of project manager to better fit the self-managed team environment, one of the core agile principles. Special emphasis is placed on the shift to servant leadership, with its focus on facilitation and collaboration. Mapping of PMBOK knowledge areas to agile practices is discussed at length. After reading this paper, project managers should have a better understanding of what changes they need to make professionally, and how to make these changes in order to survive the transition to an agile software development approach.
Book review: SharePoint for Project Management
It seems that this book does NOT cover the most complicated part of putting technology in place, the adoption of the technology by the project workers, themselves. Another complication that the author of this article did not identify is the attainment of executive-management buy-in to change the organizational process itself.
Project Management Hash tags
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Add Sticky Notemost commonly used Project Management Hash Tags used by project managers on
twitter- Apparently these are US only hashtags, per @PM4Girls - http://twitter.com/pm4girls - but still there are a lot of these things to make sure you're using properly. - on 2009-04-27
Top 10 Sources of Project Failure
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Add Sticky NoteIrrational promises made due to a failure to take into account the variable
nature of task performance.- It's amazing how often senior management believes that all project participants can deliver the same volume of final deliverables for their respective skillsets. It's not that all skills are one person deep, it's just that their resource velocities are all different.
Two C# programmers are not the same. One may code web pages faster and the other web services or the data layer. Two graphic designers will perform different aspects of their roles differently, one might crank out the CSS changes, and another be great with new creative.
Should one of them become sick or leave the project, simply introducing a new staff member will not pick things up right where they left off. Adding an additional team member will not cause the duration to become evenly divided between the newly augmented team members. - on 2009-04-27
- It's amazing how often senior management believes that all project participants can deliver the same volume of final deliverables for their respective skillsets. It's not that all skills are one person deep, it's just that their resource velocities are all different.
Top 10 Tips for Managing PMO Processes
Tip 1: Think process, not methodology. \nTip 2: Think processes, tools, and collaboration. \nTip 3: Flexibility within structure. \nTip 4: People oriented processes. \nTip 5: Process owners.\nTip 6: Process reviews. \nTip 7: Provide recognition & incentives for process improvement.\nTip 8: Define the "as-is" state. \nTip 9: Project management processes are more than PMBOK.\nTip 10: PMO processes are more than a methodology to manage projects.
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Add Sticky NoteMethodologies are static and quickly become out of date. Methodologies often
give an illusion of project management consistency, when in reality most users
don't read or follow lengthy, "one size fits all sizes," methodologies.- Amazing how often people problems have attempted solution through imposed processes. When the process imposer doesn't understand the existing process, they impose an entire methodology, not knowing which bits or pieces are meaningful to the new host organization. - on 2009-04-27
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