How To Avoid Optional Chaos In Your Project
The enormous increase in effort with very short schedules is due in large part to the work on the project morphing into wasteful activity called "optional chaos."
Continue reading »
Home » Posts tagged "Estimation" (Page 4)
How To Project Manage People Who Are Smarter Than You
Only the knowledge workers know exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. Because knowledge work is invisible, no one else, including the managers, can understand what the knowledge workers are doing or how they are doing it.
Continue reading »
Are Projects Really In Chaos?
Success is an amazingly difficult notion to objectively pin down in many projects. While we need to be flexible, I've noted that there is a fine line between flexibility and chaos. Often it is but a single voice that makes all the difference.
Continue reading »
Five Reasons Managing Projects Objectively Is Hard And How To Succeed Anyway
I'm a great advocate of managing using objective, data driven, project management tools. I often call it being "brutally honest" but with the insight it is only "brutal" to organizations that have locked themselves into other than objective approaches. Here are five reasons why being objective is hard, and ways we successfully overcame these barriers.
Continue reading »
Is Your Project Schedule Really Driven By Your Requirements?
Sometimes it is the team process and not the project requirements that determines a project's schedule.
Continue reading »
How To Get The Project Management Data We Need
In the article "Get the Schedule Right" one of the key items is to know the history of how our organization has performed in the past. As simple as this is to say, it can be very difficult to do in practice. Here are three successful techniques for getting the project management tool data we need.
Continue reading »
Yes, You Can Quickly And Accurately Estimate And Commit Your Project
There are simple project management tools that allow us to quickly and accurately estimate projects (or tasks) even when we don't have a lot of time to make the estimate nor a lot of details on the effort.
Continue reading »
It Must Be Something Other Than The Project Management Schedule
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."
Continue reading »
It’s The Project Management Schedule, Stupid
I am a big advocate of getting the project management tool schedule right for a project. While this seems obvious, what is not often as obvious is that a lot of the problems seen in a project can often be root caused back to an inadequate schedule estimate.
Continue reading »
Three Ways Project Management Estimates Fail And How To Avoid Them
Estimating the project is one of the greatest challenges, with or without fancy project management tools, that a manager will face. Here are three areas where we've seen estimates fail and how we've avoided doing the same.
Continue reading »
Project Managers Repeat After Me: Software Development Is A Repeatable Process
I had a job interview for VP of Development. The interviewing VP with a long history in the industry asked me a simple question: Did I think software development was a repeatable process? I said yes. I won't describe the ensuing discussion except to say I didn't get the job. We didn't even get to talk about project management tools!
Continue reading »
Improving Project Management Productivity Does Not Save Time
That’s the ticket. Let’s get a great project management tool that will help us get everything done faster. We’ll complete all our projects quicker and finally deliver more of them on time! Not so fast young Jedi apprentice ....
Continue reading »
Don’t Kill The Golden Goose of Project Management – The Crisis
We certainly would not sell off the fairytale Golden Goose to pay for today’s meal. We would find a way to eat today or go hungry and keep the Golden Goose until she laid that next Gold egg. Yet, too often we ignore each project management tool Golden Goose as it comes along.
Continue reading »
Project Management or Death by Detail?
There is great comfort in trying to know every detail so that we as managers can make sure everything goes right. This desire for working out all the details, using project management tools, instead often results in detail overload that obscures the most important aspects of the project. Instead, there is an often simpler approach that works surprisingly well.
Continue reading »
One Key Secret for Improving Project Management – Just Do It!
There are many techniques for improving project management in your organization. There are many newer technologies and project management tools that can replace your existing technologies. Why these help is not always because they are inherently better or improved over what you had before. Often, it is just the key act of changing in an orderly and well thought out manner that makes the huge difference.
Continue reading »