Over the years I have received a number of questions from project managers expressing the challenge of sharing bad news with their management. “No matter what the potential benefits might be,” one said, “I’ll be fired if I share news that bad.” No matter what your work environment, it seems that some people are better at sharing bad news than others and for project managers, being able to share both good tidings and bad is part of the…
I’m often asked to help organizations define their charge code structure, either for their project management system or their timesheet system. While it’s true that every organization is different and different needs result in different types of charges, there are some common practices we’ve found over the years that are universal. Ask less, not more No one likes bureaucracy, so the more complex a charge code structure you make, the less likely it will be…
On a regular basis around HMS we get specifications from clients of what they’d like to have our TimeControl timesheet do for them. It’s a necessary part of the evaluation process for a client to find the right type of timesheet for their particular business challenge. The problem is that the language that the specifications are put in are rarely those of business. Most often the specifications are made in terms of features as in “the…
In my office recently one of our most experienced employees came to me with a strange question. “How do you know if something is a project management system?” they asked. I opened my mouth to answer then paused… for a long time. The answer is not obvious. In the early 1980s the first critical path scheduling packages became available for personal computers. In fact, I find it interesting that history shows that critical-path scheduling software…
Over the years I’ve had many questions about how to effectively implement resource capacity planning. I’ve written about this often in these pages and in other articles elsewhere. Resource Capacity planning is theoretically very simple. All I need is the resource availability and the resource requirement expectations and a-b=c! Not so fast. The challenge has many facets. Who do we have? First of all, not all resources are made equal. The first challenge we’d…