Tag Archives: project challenges

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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Time and Stress Management – lessons relearned

I’ve been blog absent for almost 2 weeks – just 2 hours short of two weeks. It’s been a crazy two weeks: dad passed away and I moved. Dad went quickly and in his sleep. We know he wasn’t going to make it so we were able to say goodbye and we are all very sad when we think about it. The move went well from the perspective of the moving, but the place was so dirty I couldn’t unpack. Then I went away for two days to work with a client. So it’s been more than a week, and I just unpacked the last box today. Continue reading

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Planning without a start date.

I’m sure most of us have been in the situation where a project needs to be planned before there’s any clear date for the start. Often the start date is out of the control of the client because someone needs overriding permissions before any part of the project can start: construction in a development with more than one developer for instance. The trick is, and the question for this week, how do you know when you’ve done enough planning with the limited information? Continue reading

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Using your lessons learned. How to make the next project easier

We all know the value of using lessons learned from other projects,but how often do we get to use them?

What gets in the way?

I know it’s often difficult to find the lessons learned on any project, let alone a project that is comparable to the one you are about to start.Time,or lack of it, often gets in the way of thinking about any lessons you might want to implement in your new projects. And, organizational assumptions can seem like a barrier to making changes: “we’ve always done it this way and there’s really no way to make it better in this company”. 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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Communication Plans, the key to project success

It may be too much to say a communications plan is the key to success, but certainly not having one is going to cause everyone much unneeded stress. This communication plan is not the internal plan of status reporting, issue resolution and periodic updates, it’s for your stakeholders whoever they may be. Continue reading

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People skills and your inner voice

Have you ever wondered why that team member suddenly causes you more problems when you have less time to deal with them?

It’s not them. Continue reading

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Informal Communication, the one key project tool

The value of communication for the project manager goes beyond the communication plan. It is the one key success tool for any PM. Continue reading

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Earning PDUs – Free

Hi, those of us with our PMP designation know the PDU stress. Some leave it to the last minute, some gather PDUs over their three year cycle. But, what ever approach you use, you can have a choice of paying for them in money or time. 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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