PMcrunch

Often it is hard to decide to what to do first, or what to do next. In fact, in my experience, it is often easier to make such decisions on large projects than smaller projects. The Theory of Constraints is a neat concept that can help.

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“Performance metrics” is an especially popular topic in management today. The idea is to try to measure everything by some sort of metric that gives a true picture of our degree of success or effectiveness. But like many management techniques, it is subject to misuse. Here are my suggestions for identifying relevant metrics and using them effectively.

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“Performance metrics” is an especially popular topic in management today. The idea is to try to measure everything by some sort of metric that gives a true picture of our degree of success or effectiveness. But like many management techniques, it is subject to misuse. Here are my suggestions for identifying relevant metrics and using them effectively.

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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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I typically find change to be refreshing, but also find that it is not always possible. I also find that I have great admiration for those who can maintain a fresh and consistent outlook all of the time. They can be at the top of their games all of the time – and not necessarily incorporate that same type of change component that I do.

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If you are at all like me, achieving work/life balance is a challenge. As I think about it, there are a few key things that present the greatest obstacles – and thus provide the starting point for managing the situation.

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We never really arrive at the end of the road in our quest to become leaders. We may achieve [tag-tec]leadership[/tag-tec] status in some way but it is always a moving target. Indeed, I believe it is our own movement on a continuous basis that can enable us to maintain ourselves as a leader. One way that we can do this is by continuously evaluating our own leadership capabilities.

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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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When we first build our [tag-tec]project plan[/tag-tec], we need to make many [tag-dir]assumptions. As part of our project plan, we need to document what these assumptions are. We also need to acknowledge the reality that many of those assumptions may not prove out as the project unfolds.

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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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