Next week I’ll have the pleasure of visiting the Minneapolis/St-Paul area to speak at the Minnesota chapter of the PMI as they host their Professional Development Days event. I’ve been asked to speak on two subjects and I’m only too happy to do so. On Wednesday, September 14th I’ll be talking about Creating Business Prioritization for Projects and Portfolios where we’ll discuss how creating priorities for our projects is more about understanding our business imperatives than it is…
At my firm, HMS Software, we were delighted to launch the latest new version of TimeControl this week. TimeControl 7 was released on Monday and there’s no one happier about that than I am. I’m excited about the new release but it sparks a conversation in my firm and with people in my industry about how often should clients go between software versions. There’s several aspects to the conversation. What is a “new version”? The…
In project management, that last 1% before you can say. “We’re really complete now… Honest!” can be a long leap from 99%. I’ve talked about the Ivory Snow project syndrome before where the project becomes almost instantly 99.4 percent complete and then stays there the rest of its life. That’s a condition that often happens in the heady heyday of the early phase of a project. There’s another more sinister scenario when you’re near the…
Years ago, when most of us in the project management software industry were discussing critical path theory and how resource levelling should work, a new paradigm emerged called Critical Chain. It was developed by Eliyahu Goldratt. The issues that caused Critical Chain theory to evolve were sound. The problem with Resource Levelling is that it assumed a perfect world with perfect distribution of resources and a world where when one task was complete, the next…
It’s the dreaded 999 code that can turn a project upside down. The miscellaneous charge code into which all bad hours go can be the source of a great deal of upset and difficulty a project. In the timesheet business that we live in at HMS, we’ve see clients who have an unhealthy attachment to the 999 charge code. When you just don’t know where those hours should go or you just don’t want to…