PMcrunch

SaaS, an acronym for Software as a Service, continues to evolve in the market today. Any project or program manager involved with software application implementation needs to be very familiar with SaaS. But any project manager on any project where there are systems involved with managing any aspect of the project will also benefit by being familiar with SaaS.

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In any organization of any size and in any industry, politics is a reality. The word politics is, I would say, very definitely perceived differently by different people. Some perceive it positively, and perhaps as a game; others perceive it negatively as something to be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the reality of politics.

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Few weeks ago, I wrote a post about leadership in a virtual world in which I stated the limitations to achieve top leadership when not being directly engaged on site. The idea was that if a manager is not on site with regular phase time with subordinates, customers, associates, colleagues, and other stakeholders, he or she is not at all being positioned for increased leadership responsibility.

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The learning curve was “invented” many years ago. It refers to the competitive advantage derived from having learned a great deal about a product, service, market, or other competitive factors along the way. The learning curve can be a tremendous source of competitive advantage to organizations that have rode it upwards, especially when compared to those who have not yet accomplished that learning.

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FMEA is an important lean Six Sigma technique that has potential to be used in project management. While in Six Sigma it needs to be used at a very rigorous way, there certainly is some room for flexibility when used in project management. In either case, it is a good structured technique for analyzing problems and identifying solutions.

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The Project Management Institute, Prince II, and numerous other project management centric organizations have, for some time, had at their core that there is great an broad value to the application of structured and formal project management. At the same time, people have been managing projects really for about as long as humans have existed, albeit with varying levels of complexity. The question is, what is the value of formal project management?

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With the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States and his coming inauguration in January, we are beginning to see what his priorities would be; this is an opportunity to think through what some of the impacts will be in the project management world.

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While many project and program managers work on large multi-year projects, many of us also work on small to medium sized projects. In fact, while many of these small to medium sized projects last anywhere from weeks to months, larger projects and programs consist of a series of these small to medium sized projects. Let’s take a look at one of the most common problem solving techniques available for getting into rapid-action mode on these fast-moving projects.

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We heard it said many times that people skills are very important. However, we do see a great emphasis, whether it is in project management frameworks, or MBA programs, or Six Sigma, or any other approaches that there is a noticeable lack of people skill development embedded in the program.

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Project managers got to be project managers from a variety of career paths. Many of us have become specialists in certain areas, such as earned value, or scheduling, or critical path methods, or other such specialized techniques within the project management skill set. However, many others of us got here because it represented an opportunity to actually broaden skill sets and qualify us for other positions.

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