In the EPM industry we tend to talk about Enterprise without much consideration that it may be considered differently by different people or at different times. Many people think of an enterprise as something that applies only to large multi-national publicly traded companies. Others might think of an enterprise as a broad collection of organizations or companies. This is one of the first questions I ask when speaking to an organization who is interested in…
I’ve been focusing a lot of my project management and timesheet conceptual energies lately on looking beyond what happens in each project task in a day and looking between them to everything else that happens in a day. That has led me to numerous subjects that I’ll talk about in the coming months. The project management industry has put enormous focus on being more efficient in task management over the last 6 or 7 decades. …
I was asked a few weeks ago to write a short article for CEO Today Magazine. It was published this past week in their Online edition. The article is about a topic I speak on often: How to do more with the same resources you have and focuses on identifying and quantifying the time resources spend that are not productive for the company nor favored by the employee. An example might be how often people…
I was delighted to be asked by Global Trade Magazine (www.globaltrademag.com) to write an article on Time Management. You can read the article in its entirety at: www.globaltrademag.com/global-trade-daily/time-management-in-a-global-workforce.
“We’d like to move to more transactional project management,” was the most often repeated phrase I heard this year in project management circles. For some, this is a cry from Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) to reject the ancient project planning relics of the past and move into more modern thinking. “Let’s go Agile,” is the first call. “Let’s use one of the new project tools like JIRA or Trello,” are also signs…
As promised, my interview on Nathan Latka’s Top Entrepreneur Podcast is now live! Nathan and I discussed my company, HMS Software’s history as a premiere publisher of timesheet software and the rise of TimeControl as one of the most popular timesheet systems. I was delighted to do the show and had a lot of fun with Nathan during the discussion. I encourage you all to grab the free podcast and take a listen. The Top…
I had great pleasure of being interviewed a few days ago by Dave Gordon for a piece in the Business to Business News Network. The piece was recently published under the title Inside the Mind of… Chris Vandersluis. Dave has done a number of interviews like this over the past few months and I was delighted to be included. The interview is designed to help entrepreneurs know how companies like my own HMS Software have…
If projects were always predicable we wouldn’t need project managers. We’d just authorize the project based on what estimators had determined and then on the expected finish date, we’d pick up the completed project with the actual costs exactly meeting the projected costs. Sadly, that’s not the case. The work of project managers is so important because life is so unpredictable. In the face of almost everything challenging in our world, we have come to…
Several years ago I worked directly the Microsoft Project Team as part of their Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council. One topic that came up more than once during the 5 years I spent with the group was the impact of Excel on Project Management. At the time Microsoft estimated that over 30 million copies of Microsoft Project were in use somewhere around the world. Their own internal estimates were that over double that used…
Resource management is a subject that I lecture on often and, perhaps more interestingly, is a popular topic. You might think that after all these years of the promotion of project management practices and tools that resource management would be an old and tired subject but apparently not so much. What is it that has solving resource management challenges be so difficult? The first and most obvious answer is that we don’t all mean the…
