I’m a child of the 60s. Born in 1958, I was 8 years old when the original Batman TV series came on the air in 1966 and only 10 when it wound up in 1968. It lasted a 120 episodes but the impression it made lasts to this day. In the world of Adam West and Burt Ward who played Batman and Robin, there was a ‘bat’ solution to everything. No matter what the problem,…
Everything old it seems is new again. One of the earliest programmatic approaches to project scheduling was invented in the heyday of the Cold War. Propelled by inter service rivalries on one side and by the threat of Soviets in the arms race on the other, PERT was born. The Program Evaluation & Review Technique looked beyond a simple Critical Path Methodology (CPM) analysis to introduce the notion of risk into the project schedule. The…
One of the first things I need to do whenever I go into a company to talk about Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is to get some kind of a consensus of what it means. I can hear some of you laughing. “Surely after all this time,” you’re saying, “we have a common understanding of such a basic term in the project management industry.” No, I’m afraid not. It’s perhaps remarkable in an age when we…
Project Management systems – it’s about deployment. Sure, there are lots of functions to consider and everyone wants to know your “methodology” but if you are committed to having projects fit into a an organizational system, it all comes down to deployment. Can you assemble a system that will actually be accepted and used by the end-users who will have to use it. Deployment includes all of it: developing the concept, buying or writing the…
In our last issue I talked about determining your requirements for a corporate project management system. This month we’ll talk about creating your plan for the deployment of your project management system. What?! You don’t have a plan? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, you’re not alone, many project managers have attempted to deploy their project management system without a plan. The bad news? You’re not alone, many project managers…
It’s the hot button lately in project management circles. How can teams collaborate? It’s not idle chatter. It’s been apparent for a long time that a project manager’s role is not just calculating a schedule from his hidden laboratory deep in the bowels of the organization. Now a project manager is expected to spend the vast majority of his or her time working with others. They may be negotiating with the clients or recruiting new…
Dashboards and creating beautiful and shiny indicators of performance are all the rage but how do you ensure that your heat maps, thermometers, speedometers and traffic light icons are showing you what’s useful?
When is a proof of concept a benefit and when is it just more work with nothing to show for it? This article covers some of the basic elements of making proof of concepts work for you.
Matrix Management is good right? Not for everyone. Some organizations are moving away from Matrix Management and back towards Silo management. This article describes why.
Can you get something for nothing? In this modern age of in-the-cloud software, the answer turns out to be yes. Here are a few examples of project management tools available for free.