PMcrunch

Managing becomes so much easier when you build a foundation for what you are managing. In essence, this means getting intimate with the requirements, as well as the needs of the stakeholders. Stakeholder management and familiarity with requirements rank about as high as it gets as determinants of project success. The reason is simple: they form the basis upon which everything else is built. Building a strong foundation in these areas makes it easy to take any next steps toward managing the project.

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Earning your PMP certification can help you to better ‘lead the charge’. And, conversely, learning to ‘lead the charge’ will definitely help you to become a more effective project manager – whether you are a PMP, CAPM, or neither. But what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

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In the hassle and buzzle of day to day work life, of course mixed with a busy personal life, we need to remember that our team members also have their own personal goals, aspirations and challenges. There are many things we can do related to this but the first step is always awareness. Here are [...]

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As project and program managers we need to make sure that our projects are moving forward. We need to make sure that we identify the obstacles that get in the way of progress and that we address and remove them. We need to make sure that the greater project team has the tools and resources [...]

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Oftentimes, as[tag-dir]project managers[/tag-dir] and leaders, we are called upon to compare a variety of potential solutions and to either recommend or choose the best one for our situation. There are a variety of ways to do this. It is important for us to recognize that the answer we come up with is very closely related to the questions we ask and how we do the comparison. Many times—perhaps even most of the time—we do this comparisons in a relatively informal way, putting together our own structure. In other cases however, there is a much formalized organizational structure with a formal name such as [/tag-tec]“analysis of alternatives”[tag-dir] that is performed.

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As [tag-tec]project managers[/tag-tec], we are often called upon to present choices to our [tag-dir]stake holders[/tag-dir]We are often called upon to present options for solutions, scenarios, and items for discussions, priorities and more. There is a well proven rule that when it comes to choices, less is better.

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What do you do when hopelessness seems on the horizon? What do you do when it appears you have tried everything and nothing is working? What do you do when it appears that you are at the end of the road?

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Sustainability is a hot topic today. Many potential projects may have the appearance of socially responsible but in some cases are not sustainable. [tag-tec]Sustainability[/tag-tec] in and of itself is a key aspect of [tag-dir]social responsibility[/tag-dir]. The growing presence of [tag-dir]living roof project[/tag-dir] is a good example of sustainability in action.

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[tag-tec]Gold plating[/tag-tec], or the idea of delivering more or better than requested is generally not accepted in [tag-dir]project management[/tag-dir] doctrine. However, I think we need to take this with a grain of salt and consider how to discern when and how we might over deliver.

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[tag-tec]Task estimating[/tag-tec] is a critical skill for [tag-dir]project managers[/tag-dir] and [tag-dir]project teams[/tag-dir]. We cannot manage what we cannot estimate. However, realistically, it is very difficult to be able to estimate every possible task accurately.

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