Project Management Crisis? Hurry, But Do Nothing
We had a crisis. Another project had an emergency so we were losing a significant portion of our engineering staff to go work on that project. We had to act now!
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Home » Posts tagged "Schedule" (Page 4)
Project Management Or Anesthetized By Analytics?
Objective project management tools are something we all look for. However, too often the move to become fully objective results in a loss of insights while we are trying to figure out how to become analytical. Here are a few "gut" insights that have helped us avoid this problem.
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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.
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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.
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One Way To Make Your Project Risk Free?
We all seem to know that throwing people at a late project may only make the project later. Yet, we all too often still do it for a variety of reasons including as a way to manage risk in a project. Having your best people ready to jump in and solve problems appears to be a smart strategy, but is it really?
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Two Ways To Make Project Management Problems No Big Deal By Managing Risk
Project risk management is not about not having problems. Risk management is about being able to handle the problems that come up. With good risk management the problems that occur have a very low probability of ultimately impacting the project. Here are two approaches that have worked for us.
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Your Project Team Really Can Do A Great Job
Not all improvements require a fancy new development methodology or project management tool. Removing existing cultural and management inhibitors, while often not easy, can vault your team or organization to the next level of performance.
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Using Hard Facts To Reduce Honesty Buffers
Reducing the project management tool "honesty buffers" is a way to rapidly improve the organization. Much of what I've talked about assumed that we really did know what was going on, and it was more a matter of just delivering the facts than figuring out what the facts are. When we don't yet know the facts, but must report or update senior management, hard facts are often readily available such that we can supply something more concrete than "we don't know yet."
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Getting The Schedule Right Is Hard! But Not For The Obvious Reasons.
Making a real change is rarely easy. A real change, one that goes to the heart of a fundamental problem, is usually very difficult, but doable.
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Is Your Project Management On Steroids? Maybe You Should Kick The Habit!
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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Disrupt The Project To Make The Big Improvements
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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Project Management Needs Business Intelligence!
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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Global Project Management? Further Away Can Be Better!
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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Are You Managing the Critical Project Thread?
Sometimes we just need to bring order to one key project process to stabilize and enhance the overall project.
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Want Project Quality? Use the “B” Team
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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