An amazing 40 million people use Excel for project management. That makes Excel the 2nd most popular tool for project management (after the pencil). When we think of enterprise project management tools should we be forgetting about this one? Read more in this article.
The hottest buzz in the project management industry over the last 10 years has to be the Project Management Maturity Model. This concept is an offshoot of the thinking at Carnegie Mellon on the Capability Maturity Model which has a huge following in the manufacturing sector. Increasing one’s assessment along the PMM model encourages organizations to be more formalized, more integrated and to create project management as a core process. That sounds great but is it great for every organization? This article discusses the concept.
My friend Eric Uyttewaal, the author of numerous books on project management and the use of Microsoft Project has written a great article on how to interpret the results you see in your bar chart. “How Gantt Chart-Literate Are You?” is a good read. Enjoy.
How do you get management, the project management office and the line-project managers to take seriously how much effort it will take to implement enterprise project management? We’re often asked for “easy enteprise project management” which, I think, is an oxymoron. Project management concepts are challenging and all the moreso when they’re organizational in nature. Perhaps the “E” in EPM should stand for “Effort required” instead of “Enterprise”.
It’s easy to want enteprise project management, it’s a little harder to get it. We talk to so many organizations that initially call for a project solution to their organizational problems but, when they find out what will be required of them to get it become less enthusiastic in a hurry. It makes us ask our prospective clients: Are you sure you want the cure for what ails you?
When you look at Olympic athletes, you can see how dedication and doing the work required can produce remarkable results. The same is true for those who take on creating an enterprise project management environment. Those who hope that results will just arrive at their door mostly miss out on the remarkable achievement that is possible when you accept the work that has to be done. Here’s a short article on acknowledging the work required in creating a project management environment.
It’s one of the hottest topics in the project management industry today. We spend so much time thinking about how to do projects that we sometimes forget about whether we should do the projectds in the first place. Here’s a short article on Project Portfolio Management.
Not every organization has a Chief Project Officer but it’s a movement that is gathering momentum. When the economy is challenging, organizations take a newfound look at how projects can be managed and it is perhaps no surprise that many large companies have decided this can be best done when there is a coordinated approach that starts at the top. This article looks at the benefits of having an executive in the boardroom who will champion the project management cause.
One of the biggest and earliest challenges in implementing enterprise project management is defining the benefits to management. Talking about epm system features or the intricacies of your project management process is of little interest to management unless you can tie it to how this will impact the organization overall. This article looks at how to define the business benefits of epm.
How does one define the first critical phase of an EPM deployment? What is the minimum deployment possible that will ensure a successful EPM implementation?. This article looks at the first EPM hurdle.