Category Archives: execution

Project Management and balancing your workload

Hi, Happy new year – I hope all your projects come in on time, under budget and with all the scope your sponsor wants.

I’m doing a series of blogs over at EasyProjects.Net .

Full disclosure, I’m one of their consultants, I go in and help their clients implement the methodology that surrounds the great tool. Continue reading

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Prioritization and emergencies

So, what happens to a schedule when emergencies happen?
At one time or another the team will have emergencies that take them away from the critical work. In most projects, there will be changes to the market that cause emergency changes to scope, timelines or budget. And, often the PM is the one to direct and support the team through the emergencies. Continue reading

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Making decisions, the project manager’s challenge

Often the project manager is in the middle of a push and pull about decisions. Everyone wants to get started, but key decisions aren’t made. How do you keep everyone engaged when this is happening?

I find this one to be the most interesting challenge, and the one linked tightly to corporate culture. Continue reading

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Mergers, successful transition

I’ve worked on four successive credit union mergers and each time we developed looser success criteria. The reason we did this is integration and success on mergers is complicated and we found the tighter you tried to control it, the less successful we became.
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How Project Management Can Help You With Any Business

No matter what business you are in, you have goals and intentions. From the largest corporation to the smallest home-based business, projects are being started every day. Without proper management of these projects, all the effort, time, and money are wasted. Continue reading

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Gathering requirements is it ever complete?

The dream of gathering absolutely complete requirements is just that, a dream.You will find no matter how detailed or complete, or ‘approved as final’ your rquirements are, things will change. That isn’t a failure of the requirements, it’s a fact of project mangagement. If you try to perfect the beginning, you’ll never start your developement or build phase. Continue reading

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How do you add value to your client?

One of the questions that comes up on discussion boards and with clients is what does the Project Manager do? I have to say I’ve had my struggles in answering this question in the past. I’ve been chatting with clients … Continue reading

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Issue management or Firefighting

The challenge for Project Managers is to keep the project moving through challenges – or identify when the project shouldn’t keep moving forward. If the PM is skilled in issue management they can navigate the daily issues (or hourly issues) on any project. If they aren’t as skilled, the project goes into firefighting mode. Continue reading

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