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Posts tagged "Project Management Tools" (Page 11)
Manufacturing buffers help to smooth over problems at each stage of production. The project management tool "honesty buffer" is when someone holds back reporting issues and problems to make things look better than they are. Reducing or eliminating such buffers quickly exposes problems and enables rapid process and quality improvement.
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October 29, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication, Reporting
A busy project test organization can mean your products are having problems. In this case however, the fact they were very busy helped the test organization to stay objective about reporting dramatically improved test results without missing a beat. Other test teams described in this series of articles reacted in inefficient ways when product quality improved dramatically.
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October 4, 2009 Bruce Benson
Testing
Improving quality can have a surprisingly stressful impact on your project testing organization. A good set of quality metrics can help keep your improvements on track as your organizations adjusts to the new reality.
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September 29, 2009 Bruce Benson
Testing
Your test organization will often provide the first indicator that you’ve improved how you do business. How this shows up however, might be rather different than you would expect. Test organizations do not always handle it well when quality improves.
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September 24, 2009 Bruce Benson
Testing
There are some great project management tool techniques such as Six Sigma and Monte Carlo that can boost your productivity. Sometimes these techniques, if used too early, may be too strong a medicine for your organization.
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September 14, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Schedule
Get out of sync with what everyone else is doing. When our project is not succeeding and we keep doing what was done in the past, we are going to get the same results. The path to improvement often means being disruptive.
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September 7, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Look into using your existing business systems as part of your project management tools. The business systems used by everyone to do their daily jobs can often provide more current and predictive information than relying solely on our traditional project management tools.
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September 2, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication, Reporting
If we want a successful project, we may want to develop it remotely, so it is away from the chaos of the main office.
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August 30, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Communication, Reporting
Sometimes we just need to bring order to one key project process to stabilize and enhance the overall project.
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August 25, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Schedule
You have a big project. Critical to the company. So you put your best people on it. The "A" team. Funny, you always seem to get the same results. If your company is not doing well, your "A" team still results in you not doing well. Often, I attribute this kind of consistent pattern to a cultural or major organizational issue that needs to be resolved.
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August 20, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Team Management
The problem with being a good project manager, or any kind of good manager, is that often your project or organization is running along too smoothly. You stay on top of the issues and continuously improve the way you do things based upon feedback from your team and customers. Boring!
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August 17, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication
Some successful managers, line managers -- not just project managers, may have never experienced a successful project. A few days after I originally wrote this, I came across an on-line discussion by some senior managers that just illustrated this surprising situation so well.
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August 13, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management
What you say and how you say it may have more impact than you expect. Communicating is one of your key project management tools. Just be sure you do speak up and be reasonably persistent in getting your ideas out to the team.
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August 9, 2009 Bruce Benson
Communication
I would often talk excitedly about some project we completed that was on time and had good results. Folks would say "yeah, we did that too." In my naive enthusiasm, I would pepper them with questions on what they did and how they did it. I would get horrified looks and then they would flee. I would come to discover that too many of those other on time projects were more noise than substance. How could a simple notion such as "on time" be so complicated?"
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August 5, 2009 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Schedule
I talk a lot about "on time" as being a project management tool. This might strike many as backwards. Normally we figure if we do a good job then we will deliver on time. I maintain that often, more often than one would suspect, we can figure out what "on time" looks like and then squeeze the project into that period of time.
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August 2, 2009 Bruce Benson
Schedule
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