Project Articles by Our Faculty & Consultants
There is a better way of designing your work breakdown structure so it supports crystal clear accountability and a management style that lets the PM hold people accountable for end results, not frenzied activity. Read the article and then add your comments, pro or con, in our Project Management Blog.
Badly handled change orders cause not only overruns on budget and duration but also undermine customer/user satisfaction. The article details the mistakes project managers make on change orders and describes a methodology for doing it the right way.
Too many IT projects & departments slide into a death spiral by playing it safe and just delivering software from their projects rather than producing business value and operational improvements. Here is the way out.
The Project Office: Bureaucratic nightmare or First Aid
We look at
three types of project management office(PMO) and offer ideas on which is right for your organization and which types are a disaster.
We've identified the dumbest things that a PM can say to a sponsor or team member. There are lots to choose from and we take you through the lifecycle with examples.
Consistently successful projects are built on project team members who know what is expected of them before they start work. But the majority of team members don’t know so they waste time guessing and worrying about doing the wrong thing. There is a better way read the whole article.
Estimating project duration and costs is tough for even the most skilled PMs and it taxes executives too. See some of the estimating fantasies and some ideas that will help. Read the article and then comment in the blog If your projects are like a circus where you march behind the elephant with a big shovel, consider how you are handling the three moments of truth that largely determine how sponsors, stakeholders and your team will interact with you. Instead, frame your project within measured business achievements and give everyone crystal-clear and unambiguous checkpoints to monitor. Try to borrow a team member or two from another department and suddenly it's the middle ages with feudal department managers fighting to the death to avoid sharing a resource. Sure they promised their "full support"; during initiation but now you have to battle for each of your resources..
Too many project offices (PMO) are known for paper-shuffling, pointless meetings, bureaucracy and little else. There are alternatives designs that may fit your organization and produce business value, not just paper Sponsors and project managers doom their projects to failure when they manage only the due date rather than all four corners of a project: business value, budget, risk and due date. When we focus only on dates, people may lower the business value, increase the risk, and increase the cost of hitting that day without giving decision-makers the opportunity to decide which trade-offs they want. In this issue we lay out how to manage the trade-offs between these four corners to improve project success rates. Read the article Too often project managers deliver progress reports that stupefy executives and tell them nothing about what's going on. This undermines the PM's credibility. These mind-numbing techniques range from "techno -babble" to the "Girl Scout cookie approach."
As organizations evolve though stages in their project management processes, knowing where your company is can help you survive and do better on your projects.
Many organizations suffer 50% or higher project failure rates. We look at the reasons and what's required of PMs, sponsors, portfolio managers and team members to improve success rates.
A good project charter throws gasoline on smoldering embers. We want all the potential problems to flare up before we start work on the project so we can resolve then early.
Are users and clients pulling up to your project drive-in window and just shouting their requirements? All project drive-ins are unhappy places that get lots of complaints because 80% of the projects leave their users with indigestion. See how to do initiation the right way.
At 4pm.com, we spend a lot of time teaching clients and students to manage projects with achievements and not fall into what we call the “Activity Trap.” PMs fall into this trap when their project plan is nothing but a “to do” list of features, good ideas and a laundry list of requirements. These PM’s projects fail most of the time - finishing late, over budget and producing little of value because of the double-curse of the activity trap. Click to read the rest of the article
Gaining control of an organization's portfolio of projects is no easy matter. Each segment of the portfolio presents its own challenges. But, no segment is tougher to control than the segment we call puppy projects. Organizations give birth to litters of these little projects every year and they usually run uncontrolled, making a mess everywhere. Executives often kid themselves, thinking that they can focus on only the large strategic projects and somehow ram those through. However, that never works because there are too many puppies underfoot, and the mess they make is down low in the organization.
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