Project Management By Living With Our Data

Living With Our Project Management Tool Data
Knowing our project and organization at a gut level allows us to judge and react both rapidly and with accuracy. Living with data, by being immersed in it -- at least upon occasion, can only help us continue to get better at managing our projects.
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Metrics Change Management

In Project Management — Patience Is Not A Virtue

Project Management Patience
Patience is a project management tool that can help us bring about improvements to how we manage projects as well as improvements to the organization as a whole. I discovered that patience was more about waiting for an opportunity to improve things and then jumping on it than it was about waiting for the organization to recognize our brilliant ideas and joyfully adopt them.
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Change Management 5 Comments Metrics Change Management Management

Get the Project Management Cost Right!

Get The Project Management Cost Right
Computing the project cost using our project management tools is a fundamental step in planning a project. Yet, I’ve found that some managers have a tough time when large numbers are involved or it is the first time they’ve ever seen an accurate overall cost of a project.
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Cost

It Must Be Something Other Than The Project Management Schedule

Getting More Project Management Tool Schedule Details
The notion that an inadequate project management schedule is often the root cause of other problems in the project generated some insightful responses. While insightful, they also illustrate what I consider to be the typical misconceptions we have about how project problems are just too complex to ever be "simply the schedule."
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Schedule 2 Comments Schedule 23 Comments

Project Management Metrics Madness? Don’t Do It!

Unhappy With Project Management Tool Requirements Creep
It happened pretty regularly. To make some functionally work on the project we needed something else that we overlooked. No problem. We make the change -- tag it as a missed requirement in our project management tool -- and approve it. A couple of weeks later the additional functionality is completed and gets submitted to be put into the product. It is submitted as a “new requirement.” It shows up as scope creep. I called up the project manager and explain they tagged it incorrectly. Please change it to a missed requirement. “Oh no!”, she practically yells, “It is a new requirement!
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Metrics

Project Management is Simple But Not Obvious

Project Management Is Simple But Not Obvious
I spend a lot of time talking about falling back and using simple project management tools when projects are not going as well as expected. Most management, project or otherwise, I always considered pretty simple. Simple doesn't mean easy to do. Often, it is very hard but the right thing to do.
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Change Management Cost Team Management Schedule Planning