Separating People Management From Project Management By Johanna Rothman I was on the phone this morning with a senior manager. He was describing their current project: “Well, we’ve got 25 people: 12 developers, 6 testers, 2 writers, 4 support people, and 1 project manager.” I asked about the managers of the developers and testers. “Oh, the dev [...]

The Project Manager Must Be a Master of Paradox By Richard Morreale One of the major parts of the Project Management Success Equation (20%SS [Soft Skills] + 80%HS [Hard Skills] + 8S [8 Different Skills] + MOP=Success) is MOP which stands for the Master of Paradox. Let me explain. I believe that truly great Project Managers [...]

How Is the PMP Exam Organized? By Bogdan Gorka PMI and your practice First of all it is worth remembering during the entire exam preparation period that the PMP exam is based on practice. It means that most of the questions will be based on situations and your task in choosing the right answer is to know which [...]

Project Portfolio Management - Projects Must Position the Firm For Future Success By Jessie L. Warner In this article, I want to talk about how projects should contribute to the firm’s health and help position the firm for future success. Remember, for project portfolio management to be effective, projects must: Be aligned with the firm’s strategy and goals Be consistent [...]

Anatomy of an Effective Project Manager By Gary Hamilton, Gareth Byatt, and Jeff Hodgkinson It’s first thing in the morning, and you are preparing to interview prospective project managers for an open position on your team. Whether it is your first candidate interview or you have conducted many before in your career, you are likely to be [...]

Adapting Pareto Principle For Project Management By Kathlika Thomas There are not many observable instances in our natural surroundings where we find an equal distribution of anything of value. Population, wealth, workplace productivity, even the harvest of a farmer’s plot - there is a concentration of produce generated by the minority that accounts for the majority of [...]

The Essence of Driving - A Crash Course in Project Management By Ivo Manolov About a year ago, I got feedback from my team that I needed to clarify what I meant by “drive this effort” or “lead that effort”. So I decided to create a quick document explaining what I meant. Below is that document. There are [...]

How to Pick a Good Project Sponsor By Peter Taylor Critical to any projects success is having a good project sponsor, but, like the saying goes ‘you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives’ and the same is true of project sponsors. So what makes a good project sponsor and how do you deal with [...]

Critical Project Resources - The Software Architect By Dave Nielsen In the early days of software development little thought was given to how the software applications and systems we built were architected. There were several reasons for this: firstly, software development being new, the concept hadn’t been thought of, and secondly we didn’t realize how important architecture [...]

Project Portfolio Management - Projects Must Effectively Use the Firm’s Resources By Jessie L. Warner In my last article I talked about the need for projects to contribute to a positive cash flow. To continue with the series, I want to talk about some ways to effectively use a firm’s resources. Be aligned with the firm’s strategy and [...]

Fatal Assumptions and Change Management By Gail Severini “If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got” – True and so what? Well, often (usually) we need to move ourselves and our people out of comfortable situations in order to achieve different (hopefully better) results. And as ‘easy’ as this looks [...]

Engaging Your Stakeholders By Jennifer Doyle Although this article is primarily aimed at Business Analysts, it can easily apply to Project Managers… One of the most common things I hear from analysts is that they cannot get all of their stakeholders to provide their sign-offs in a timely way. Some stakeholders see sign-off as a lower priority task [...]

Why Do Most Projects Fail To Set Guiding Principles? By Hans Danielsson During my career I have been part of a large number of projects, from small simple ones to large $100M+ complex projects changing the core of a customers business. Regardless of size, one thing that a lot of them seem to fail doing well is [...]

Project Management and the Alien Encounter By Peter Taylor I suspect that you will all know this story: Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says [...]

The Perennial Time and Scope Dilemma By Literal Thinking In one of our earlier articles, we introduced a fairly familiar project scenario where signoff points for scope and time overlap. This typically happens when deliverable (scope) signoffs are crammed into one time block, often also coinciding with the end of a particular phase (time) of a project. [...]

The Shortest Path to a Good Project Management Methodology By Ben Snyder, CEO of Systemation You look across your organization and see a wide variation between your good project managers and the weaker ones. Everyone seems to be doing their own thing and no one is taking advantage of your organization’s best practices. You say to yourself, [...]

Taking Over As a Project Manager of a New Project? By Chris Marr What are the first steps when you take over as a project manager of a new project? Firstly, I’m hoping you know the triple constraints (scope, budget and schedule) and their importance to the PM at the start of a project, at the end, and [...]

Project Management for Dummies By Gina Loubser After more than a decade of working with Project Managers I have mastered their evil art. Based on my observations over the years I have come up with what must surely be the ultimate guide to Project Management: Identify people to blame. People always say that the Project Manager is to [...]

Oh No, My Dad Is a Project Manager! By Dennis Brooke I’ve used skills developed as a project manager to deliver multi-million dollar projects, develop an award winning airport management team, and even organize household tasks. One of my friends, nicknamed “Bubba,” also uses what he’s learned as a project manager–to raise his children. Every day he and [...]

Global Project Management - 5 Tips to Manage a Global Team By Lynn Anderson One of my colleagues asked me this question which I believe pertains to many of you out there. “With so many companies outsourcing services to places like India, China, Poland as well as having operations in countries around the world, how can a [...]