Benefits Realisation Plan - Program Management By The Office of Government Commerce - OGC, UK Purpose of the Benefits Realisation Plan Used to track realisation of benefits across the programme Fitness for Purpose Checklist Are the dates by which the benefits should accrue clearly understood and realistic? Are the dates by which the benefits should accrue in line with the programme [...]

Horse Trading and Project Management By Marty Davis, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) I asked two of our regular contractors to tell us what doing business in the commercial world is like. They talked about fixed-price contracts, and how this was the way to go to hold down your overall costs. But with a fixed-price contract, [...]

Ten Ways to Ensure Project Failure By Ahmed Hafeez Sometime ago I read an article about the top ten ways to destroy the earth. Although it is a bit morbid to even think about such a topic let alone compile a top ten list, it certainly is an interesting scientific problem. Blowing planet earth to bits is [...]

Control Factors in Project Management - Money (#2 in the series Coordination of Projects in Project Management) By Wouter Baars The evaluation of financial matters by a programme manager involves the following issues: Is the project as a whole, and the following phase in particular, adequately financed? What are the possible financial risks of the project? Should a go/no-go [...]

Vendor Management - Project Managers Get a C-minus By Samuel Prasad Project managers are woefully ill-prepared in the area of procurement and/or vendor management. I am being very generous when I give them a grade of C-minus. Price doesn’t matter and SLA’s (service level agreements) are only marginally important. It sounds quite dubious, and I am sure I [...]

Incorporating Configuration Management on Your Project By Dave Nielsen Software configuration management is intended to control the configuration of a software product or system throughout the life cycle of the product and that includes the project that builds it. Software development organizations that have been certified as CMM or CMMI Level 2 or above will have a [...]

Assumptions: The Elegant Risk By Abdulla Alkuwaiti Introduction If there was an elegant risk in projects, then it will be assumptions. Its elegance comes from the way how people often justify wrong assumptions that leads to risks. They often use phrases like “what can I do”, “I thought it will never happen” and “it’s impossible”. It is as [...]

CMM and Project Management - Tracking and Oversight By Dave Nielsen The goal of the Software Project Tracking and Oversight Key Process Area (KPA) is to provide sufficient insight into project performance so that the project manager can detect variances between performance and the plan and take preventive or corrective action. This KPA influences all PMBOK knowledge [...]

The 8 Dimensions of Project Management By Tomer Sagi I’ve been thinking about this concept for a while now and decided to put it together in a diagram and see if it works. I tend to see Project Management go beyond the standard triangle of constraints (Time, Cost, Scope while controlling Quality). I wanted to include the Needs and [...]

Kicking Off the Project Team By Gina Abudi One of the most important things a team leader can do is find time to kick off the start of the project with the project team. I’m not talking about day 1 and the group is together ready to dig in on the project. Prior to the actual start [...]

Traditional Project Management vs. Agile Development with SaaS Projects By Dan Orlando Introduction The purpose of this article is not to define Agile development methods (there’s more than enough of that out there already), but rather to identify the characteristics of a company that is properly implementing and seeing positive results from Agile Project Management. When an SaaS (Software [...]

Attain Better Business Organization With Online Project Management By Dana Larson In today’s business world, people are busier than ever. Workloads have increased significantly, and everyone wants to put forth more effort to ensure their business can improve and increase revenue. And when everyone is busy and running around like the proverbially chicken with its head cut [...]

The Magic Number 7 in Project Management By John Duff For years I wondered why so many things appeared in collections of 7 items. There are Snow White’s 7 Dwarfs, the 7 Deadly Sins, the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, and the 7 Seas. Nearer to home, local phone numbers have 7 digits, standard vehicle license plates [...]

Communication and Collaboration in Project Management - Working Collaboratively (#34 in the Hut Introduction to Project Management) By JISC infoNet Actively involving stakeholders in projects is quite different from simply informing them about what is going on. There are lots of ways you can engage people with your project. A few suggestions are given below: Social events - [...]

How to Calculate the ROI of an IT Project By Ahmed Hafeez ROI communication & calculation can make a difference in a project getting funded or not. In today’s economic climate justifying the cost and benefits of an IT initiative has become more important than ever. Often the fate of an IT project depends on the justification of [...]

Deming’s 14 Points and Quality Project Leadership By J. Alex Sherrer Quality is misunderstood by many who think of it only as it relates to the final deliverable, but a quality product is itself achieved only through quality processes focused on efficiency, innovation, and continual improvement, and these require a quality management culture not only in our [...]

On Prioritizing Your Projects By Demian Entrekin Let’s just say for a minute that you have somewhere around 25 relatively important projects that are active. And let’s say that you have about 25 that are in the hopper that are also deemed “important” from the standpoint of the sponsors. They might even be considered “urgent” or “mission [...]

Project-based Knowledge Management By Chuck Tryon and Suliman Hawamdeh For several years, organizations have recognized a growing gap between what they need to know and the knowledge they possess. The emerging discipline of Knowledge Management has made this an active discussion for most executives plotting the future of their organizations. KM, however, has struggled to attract the [...]

How-much vs. How-little Thinking in Project Management By Johanna Rothman Many project managers (and senior management) still have the mindset of “How much can we fit into this project?” instead of “How little can we do?” How-much thinking carries these assumptions (even if your managers don’t agree): People are a scarce resource, and that we should put all of [...]

Using a Time-Sequenced Network Diagram By Dave Paradi Almost every MS Project user is familiar with the Gantt chart as a graphical view. The problem with many Gantt charts is that when printed, they are so large that trying to follow the flow of tasks through the project for tracking is almost impossible. Also, the chart gets [...]