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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…

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’ve been a proponent of Enterprise Project Management since I first entered the project management industry in the early 1980s. You’d think, then, that I would always vote on the side of centralized project management, but that isn’t always the case. Let’s discuss for a moment just what we mean by Enterprise Project Management. EPM can mean a lot of different things to different people. I’ve already discussed in other articles in this column how…

 Every year I spend days in project management software exhibition halls, so you’ll forgive me I hope for harping on what has become a bit of a cliché in our industry.  You know the one I’m talking about – Enterprise Project Management Software.  It must be the hangover from the ERP implementation craze from years ago because it seems that every software system available to mankind today is “Enterprise”-something.  Vendors seem to all be either…

It’s what everyone wants but almost no one gets: Enterprise-wide resource capacity planning.  Just what makes getting this accomplished so difficult? I’m sure I hear it at least once a week (during a trade show, twice an hour), what organizations are asking of their project management system boils down to enterprise-wide resource capacity planning.  Now I know that everyone has a little of the “grass is greener on the other side” syndrome where you think…

In 1966, the original Batman TV series came on the air. It lasted only 120 episodes but it changed a culture in ways that last to this day. In the world of Batman and Robin (played by Adam West and Burt Ward), there was a ‘bat’ solution to everything. No matter what the problem, Batman would have the solution. The Batmobile, Batboat, Batplane, and Batcave all had their place. And if you were someone who…

I am delighted to see another of my articles in the “From the Trenches” column on Microsoft’s TechNet.  I’ve been doing these pieces for the Microsoft Project technical area of the the TechNet website for a number of years and am very flattered that they continue to ask for them and, even better, publish them! The latest article is called Are we there yet? and describes my experiences with deploying enterprise systems like Microsoft Project…

This paper was originally delivered at the PMI Global Congress in New Orleans in October 2013.
This article discusses how to identify a project which should be cancelled, distinguish it from a project that is merely troubled and then if need be, actively cancel a project in a way that is empowering to the project team, the organization, the stakeholders and even the project manager.